The long history behind BC’s group home cuts
NOTE: Please visit our new Group Home Cuts Web page for more news and information on this issue
Background
There has been constant and often intense pressure to close professionally-staffed group homes for adults with developmental disabilities and reduce the role of unionized care arrangements since the BC Liberals took office in 2001.
There are good reasons to offer alternatives, as group homes are not right for everyone. But for government at least, the primary motivation all along has been about reducing spending. A major shift from group homes towards more informal and affordable adult care arrangements was to be a key component of the community living restructuring that led to CLBC. At the outset, BC Liberal insider/CLBC architect Doug Walls promised that this and other proposed reforms would reduce community living costs by 20%. But community push-back against efforts to close group homes to produce the bulk of the promised savings has led to a constant battle since that time.
In 2006, when CLBC was under the Ministry for Children and Families, the Minister ordered a $2 million survey called the Residential Options project, which required CLBC to interview every single one of its almost 3,000 group home residents to see if they'd consider moving to a less formal arrangement. The answer was an overwhelming No! - despite repeated government assurances that this was about offering more choices, not about saving money.
Disabled adults fighting back to save their homes
The Victoria Times Colonist has been covering a nasty fight taking shape as Community Living BC has been strongly pressuring agencies to close group homes in an effort to find more than $20 million in savings.
Agencies and group home residents are complaining about strong-arm bully tactics by CLBC, as developmentally disabled adults are forced out of their homes, and with officials then lying to the public to cover up what's happening.
Here is a link to a U-Tube video: Save Our Group Homes
And some recent news coverage:
Victoria Times Colonist: BC government agency accused of duping public about group homes
Special Education and the Private/Public debate
We recently had a lively but respectful discussion on our email network on the public/private education debate as it relates to special education in particular, with a wide range of views. Here are my thoughts. Please add further comments covering anything I've missed, or let me know if we have permission to post your earlier comments shared via email:
Catching up on a very interesting debate...
To answer the original question about private/independent education (the distinction being really just branding because independent schools are becoming less so as they accept more govt funding and consider unionization, etc), I think we need to consider what is the whole point of having public schools in the first place.
If our forefathers thought the most important features of education were choice, flexibility and competition, they'd have chosen the competitive, elitist British model, as the US did. They didn't. They very consciously chose a different way - one that was intended to give each Canadian child an equal opportunity to achieve their unique individual potential, regardless of the circumstances of birth.
BCers want more early intervention!
Here is some good news for a change - but will BC's government listen?
Poll shows support for increasing early childhood spending
Tom Sandborn
April 28, 2010
More than 70 per cent of B.C. residents underestimate how many of the province's children enter school developmentally vulnerable, an Angus Reid poll released today shows.
And most of those polled expressed strong support for increased public spending once they learned how many B.C. children are at risk and how low Canadian investment in early childhood education and daycare is in contrast to other wealthy countries. Read more
Youth hits black hole at 19, MCFD seizes siblings
This has to be one of the most heartbreaking stories I've heard. CBC News readers have reacted with an outpouring of outrage, but whether this has any power to move Ministers Coleman or Polak remains unclear:
Children taken because of mentally ill brother
Kamloops parents say lack of government help for son put other children at risk
April 27, 2010
A couple in Kamloops had their three youngest children removed by the B.C. government after they gave shelter to their violent, mentally ill adult son, who had been turned away from government care.
"We were backed into a corner," said the children's mother, Leah Flagg. "We had to choose between the well-being of one child or our other children."
Leah and Steve Flagg have four children, aged 11 to 20. Leah said her oldest son, Trevor, has brain damage and has been diagnosed with several types of mental illness. She said he can be paranoid, obsessive and violent.
When he was 13, he beat his mother badly, she said, so the parents placed him in the care of B.C.'s Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD). He had also harmed his younger siblings.
"He does really well when he's on medication and the medication is working. When he's not stabilized, conflict can become a physically aggressive situation in seconds," said Leah.
Nowhere else to go
Trevor was living in a secure youth residence, with 24-hour supervision, when he turned 19. At that point, because he was an adult, the ministry was no longer responsible for him. His parents said they could find no other government agency or community agency to take him in. Read more
Busy fighting education cuts…
I haven't been able to post updates in the past month, with every spare moment devoted to trying to stop or at least mitigate the horrendous cuts to special education - and everything else - in our public schools across this Province.
Here are some links to information on education and special education cuts:
- Vancouver Parents for Successful inclusion: letter to minister warning that provincial framework forces districts to concentrate cuts in areas like Special Ed to offset provincial funding shortfalls. Read the letter
- Vancouver Special Education Advisory Committee documents loss of special education teachers despite a 35% increase in students with special needs, warns further cuts planned for Vancouver will present safety risks and deny access. Read the brief and district stats
- BC Education Coalition/Stop BC Education Cuts: Provincial website and Facebook group gathering information about cuts and various initiatives to fight them. The site includes a section devoted to special education news and impacts
Op Ed: Cutting social services won’t pay benefits
The following is an excellent Op-Ed published couple weeks ago in the Victoria Times Colonist. Sadly the 2010 Provincial budget presented March 3 promises exactly the sort of short-sighted, "penny wise, pound foolish" cuts that Ms Charlesworth warned against.
Cutting social services won't pay benefits
Slashing government programs will push up health-care costs
By Jennifer Charlesworth, Special to Times Colonist
February 17, 2010
An economist with one of Canada's big banks commented to media last month that health-care spending is the budgetary equivalent of Pac-Man, "eating everything else in people's budgets."
In B.C., health-care spending has risen almost 50 per cent in the last eight years and accounts for more than 40 per cent of all provincial expenditures. In Canada, the $128 billion a year spent on health care consumes 12 per cent of the national GDP.
Is that simply the price we have to pay for good health?
In a word, no. For many years, researchers have studied the factors in a person's life that determine good health. They concluded long ago that a good health-care system is by no means the only requirement -- in fact, it's just a quarter of the story. Read more
Update on MCFD restructuring & budget
The Ministry for Children & Families, which now has responsibility for managing and funding all out-of-school services and supports for children and youth with special needs, faces significant challenges in the year ahead.
Despite promises to protect the budgets for special needs, senior Ministry staff have confirmed that unfunded new costs and rising demands will further strain existing services. On top of this, the Ministry is in the midst of another major restructuring, which includes integrating special needs services with other children's services in a new regional management framework.
MOMS was invited to a meeting on February 15 for an update on Ministry plans and challenges. Our unofficial report on the discussion can be found here. We will continue to share any further information or updates as they reach us and welcome first-hand reports from families about how the restructuring and budget challenges may be affecting them personally.
BC Professionals condemn autism cuts, changes
As Victoria parents prepared for a candlelight vigil at the Legislature Monday Feb 1 to mourn the Province's closure of critical autism early intervention programs, the BC Association for Behaviour Analysis -- the equivalent of the BC Medical Association -- issued a lengthy position statement criticizing these and other recent autism policy changes.
The Association calls for significant increases to the current autism funding levels for preschoolers, for funding to be tied to individual need, and for restoration of the direct funding option for families. It also strongly condemned the lack of consultation over the controversial changes announced by Children's Minister Mary Polak last fall.
"Many people in the Autism community were shocked and disturbed by the closure of all of the EIBI programs and the funding structure changes," the BC ABA statement reads. "...Furthermore, discussions with stakeholders might have resulted in a more sound decision on how to achieve province-wide, equitable access to services for individuals with ASD."
The BC ABA joins parents, advocacy groups and other professionals who have universally panned the province's abrupt autism policy changes, stating that the new provincial funding formula for preschoolers with autism "is not sufficient to purchase intensive behavioural therapy at the level (25-40 hours per week) which research has shown to be effective." The Association cites the example of other Canadian provinces that fully fund the costs of early intervention, noting that "given the discrepancy between provincial funding and the actual costs of implementing an intensive ABA program, few children in British Columbia will likely receive the intensity of treatment that has been empirically shown to improve the core characteristics of Autism." (Emphasis added)
Boards warn of looming cuts targetting Special Ed
Vancouver and Victoria join the growing list of BC school districts warning that special education could bear the brunt of unprecedented budget cuts projected for 2010-11, due to unfunded costs that the province is downloading on school boards.
Surrey: Last week, Surrey DPAC warned that some $18-20 million in downloaded/unfunded provincial costs will result in program cuts that directly harm students. (Press release attached)
Victoria: Victoria trustees told the Times Colonist yesterday they would have to consider cutting the district's Special Education program to balance their budget.
Vancouver: Last week, Vancouver served notice that up to 800 teachers could be laid off to address a provincial funding shortfall ranging from $17 to $35 million, depending on what the province decides to fund in the upcoming provincial budget. And at a meeting for parents of students with special needs this week, the Board Chair acknowledged that special education was particularly vulnerable to cuts, since staff costs are protected via contracts and class size is now protected by legislation, leaving unprotected services like special education as one of the few areas they can cut.
Virtually every school board in the province is confronting similar choices, given the limited number of unprotected programs, like special ed, that they can cut to make up for unfunded provincial costs, since all boards are required by law to balance their budgets regardless of provincial funding shortfalls. Accentuating the looming threat to special education is that the province only funds half or less of what districts actually spend on special ed - a subsidy that is hard for trustees to defend when schools are being closed and core programs slashed.
At the core of this unprecedented crisis is the growing number of downloaded costs that the province has so far refused to cover in provincial education funding grants. These include further increases for teacher salaries and benefits under contracts that the province negotiated, new provincial carbon tax and carbon offset charges, increases to provincial MSP and WCP premiums, implementation costs of new provincial requirements like Bill 33 and full-day kindergarten, and general inflation, which the provincial funding formula also does not cover.
The provincial government will present its budget for 2010-11 in early March and has to date refused to consider new funding to cover these new costs, leaving districts projecting the largest deficits seen in a decade, and cuts that will seriously impact students.
Vulnerable kids unfairly targeted
Provincial officials are justifying the cuts by stating that districts have to tighten their belts like anyone else. This response fails to acknowledge that districts cannot force most district services to tighten their belts because they are protected by provincially-negotiated contracts and requirements. Staff will not sacrifice pay or benefits and boards must also find a way to cover new pay and benefit increases negotiated by the province. Along with provincial requirements governing a host of activities, from class size to reporting and administrative roles, this means districts actually have very few options or "discretionary" spending that can be cut when they are told to tighten their belts.
In effect, school board "belt tightening" amounts to downloading a provincial budgetary crisis onto the most vulnerable students in our public schools - students with special needs, ESL and Aboriginal students and those who need additional programs and supports to succeed. In failing to provide any policy to protect these programs and students while protecting everything from teacher pensions to teacher-student ratios in law, the province has created an uneven playing field that forces school boards to unfairly penalize their most vulnerable students whenever cuts must be made.
ADVOCACY: What you can do
The harsh reality facing our kids is just emerging and there is very little time to act. Parents and advocacy groups representing students with special needs and other vulnerable groups need to act immediately, by telling their MLAs, Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid, Finance Minister Colin Hansen and Premier Gordon Campell that it is not acceptable to target BC's most vulnerable students to solve a problem they had no hand in creating.
1. We need to convince government to cover all education costs in the 2010-11 budget before it is presented on March 3.
2. Strength in numbers. We can be most effective if we join with broader groups of parents, PACs and public education advocacy groups to demand that the province fully fund all provincially-mandated costs, including special education - instead of fighting each other for shares of an inadequate budget and ignoring the roots of the problem.
- Contact your PAC and DPAC and encourage them to write the Premier, FInance Minister, Education Minister and your local MLAs - just as Surrey DPAC has done.
- Join our growing Facebook group "Stop BC Education Cuts" to find out what other parents and districts are doing, to find and share information about cuts and to connect with other parents or advocacy efforts in your community.