Fl. State Accused of ‘Dumping’ Disabled Kids

The Florida health and disabilities administrators have been continuously dumping sick and disabled children, some of which are babies, in different nursing homes that are designed to care for elders that are in violation of the children’s rights. There are hundreds of these children spending their years in hospital like institutions, sometimes growing up in hospital equivalent rooms with little to no education or even socialization. A 22 page letter was written to Attorney General Pam Bondi by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Bondi’s office are the ones that are defending the state against any previously lawsuits filed that claim the institutionalization of the children violates the federal law and the children’s civil rights.

The Letter

The 22 page letter was written by the Assistant US Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, is the first attempt by the federal government to weigh in on any of the controversy. Towards the end of the letter, he outlined numerous steps that the state would be able to take to reduce this reliance on the nursing home beds for those frail children. If there is no correction, he went on to state that “the Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit” of his own. A lot of these children remain in these nursing homes for much of their lives, and numerous children have spent a decade or longer institutionalized, the report stated, including some of those children that have entered these facilities since they were infants and toddlers. “Indeed, the state has planned, structured and administered a system of care that has led to the unnecessary segregation and isolation of children, often for many years, in nursing facilities,” the report said.

Federal Americans with Disabilities Act

Under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, those people that have disabilities or medical conditions have to be housed and then treated in community settings whenever it is possible, not in big institutions that are isolated. Since this law was passed in 1990, those advocated for disabled people and children have used this act to shut down large, squalid institutions and move those disabled and mentally ill people to their new homes or into group homes that are a part of larger sized communities. However, in recent years the state of Florida health administrators have relied on these nursing homes to be home to hundreds of children that could live at home safely with their parents, often at less of an expense to the state, compared to the nursing homes,

In the 22 page letter, Perez stated that the state has cut millions of dollars from programs that are able to support the parents of disabled children, refused more than $40 million in federal dollars that was to help enable some children to be able to stay at home or even return home, and encouraged nursing homes to house children by being able to increase their per diem rates. Such policies as these, states the Justice Department, are not only against federal law, but they hurt the children that are housed in nursing homes that are ill equipped to care for them. The children are often deprived of any sort of education, unable to see their family members, parents, and siblings, have no socialization and often times are forced to sit in front of a television for hours due to the lack of recreational activities offered.