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Iowa is failing people with disabilities
David Leshtz
Apr. 24, 2024 9:22 am, Updated: Apr. 24, 2024 11:55 am
State Rep. Josh Turek of Council Bluffs has in recent months cited many reasons Iowa is not a good place to have a disability: long waiting lists for in-home and community-based care, severe restrictions on Medicaid eligibility, the governor’s efforts to dismantle services for special education provided by our Area Education Agencies, and more — yet this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Iowa also lags in the development of community services. Many states have closed their institutions for people with severe disabilities, but thousands of Iowans don’t have the opportunity to become part of the fabric of our society instead of living as segregated outcasts far from their families and communities. In December of 2021, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice found that Iowa “plans, administers, and funds its public health service system in a manner that unnecessarily segregates people with intellectual disabilities in the Resource Centers (Glenwood and Woodward), rather than providing these services where people live, in their community.”
In April of 2022, Iowa Department of Health and Human Services Director Kelly Garcia announced that Glenwood Resource Center on the western edge of the state would close its doors. Garcia said, “This notion that you are admitted at age two and you live eighty years there is no longer the way we as a society would want to support a human being.” Gov. Kim Reynolds agreed, stating that “our best path forward to achieve [the standards of the U.S. Department of Justice] is closing Glenwood and reinvesting in a community-based care …”
Advocates for people who have disabilities hoped Iowa would finally — after more than a century of neglect — protect the constitutional rights of its most vulnerable citizens and develop opportunities to live as independently as possible. Serving people close to home, where oversight is easier, decreases the chances of abuse, neglect, and mistreatment documented by the DOJ. It would also save or redirect a good chunk of the nearly $400,000 in state and federal tax dollars spent annually per resident.
How’s it going, two years later?
A report issued this past October by a state monitoring team found Glenwood to be out of compliance with fifty of sixty-five standards of medical care. It was out of compliance with thirty of thirty-four standards for transition into community settings. The deaths of residents while at the institution have not been adequately reviewed. Eight deaths of residents who died after transitioning have not been reviewed at all. Staff training on transitioning was found to be inadequate. In the last fifteen months eighteen residents were moved to Woodward Resource Center — not a community-based provider. As is typical of the Reynolds administration, little information is available to the public on whatever progress has been made.
Rep. Turek says Iowa is not a good place to have a disability. It is also not a good place to live if you care about government transparency, more efficient use of tax dollars, and equal citizenship for all Iowans.
David Leshtz lives in Iowa City and is editor of The Prairie Progressive, where this article first appeared.
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