Amy Grattan Named Director of Sherlock Center

Grattan Sherlock Center Photo

Grattan Sherlock Center Photo

By Gina Macris

Amy Grattan, an expert in special education with a focus on early childhood, has been appointed director of the Paul V. Sherlock Center on Disabilities at Rhode Island College.

Grattan “brings a breadth of knowledge and experience in the field of disability and special education,” according to a Sherlock Center statement on her appointment.

Grattan will help ensure that “Rhode Island’s citizens with disabilities have a strong and vibrant advocate” and will “strengthen the many positive collaborative relationships with Rhode Island school systems and community partners,” the statement said.

The Sherlock Center, a federally funded University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD), has served as a key resource as Rhode Island tries to transform its services for adults with developmental disabilities from a segregated model to an inclusive one to comply with the integration mandate of the Americans With Disabilities Act, as required by a 2014 civil rights consent decree.

The Sherlock Center has provided a philosophical framework on inclusion, as well as technical assistance, research and specialized training and educational programs for state employees, direct care workers, families and individuals who themselves receive developmental disability services.

A Sherlock Center staff member since 2005, Grattan has served as a consultant for initiatives aimed at improving early childhood education nationwide and in Rhode Island, collaborating with the state Department of Education and with local school districts. Currently, she also serves as a consultant on early childhood education for the Sherlock Center’s counterpart at the University of Connecticut.

In addition to early childhood education, she has expertise in alternate assessments, standards-based instruction, and helping teachers understand students significant disabilities and autism, accoring to the Sherlock Center statement.

Grattan also has served Rhode Island College as an adjunct professor in special education and early childhood education at the masters’ level. Her appointment became effective Oct. 21, according to a Sherlock Center spokeswoman.

Grattan succeeds A. Anthony Antosh, who had served as director of the Sherlock Center since its inception in 1993. Antosh was responsible for securing the federal grant which established the Sherlock Center as a UCEDD. The center was named after the late Paul V. Sherlock, a special education professor at Rhode Island College and state legislator who became widely known as a tireless advocate for Rhode Islanders with disabilities.

Providence Woman Featured In "Intelligent Lives," New Documentary Film On Inclusion

By Gina Macris

“Intelligent Lives,” a new documentary film, profiles Rhode Islander Naomie Monplaisir and two other adults with intellectual disabilities whose personal stories defy conventional assumptions and help the filmmaker deliver a strong rebuke of standard IQ testing.

Naomie Monplaisir Photo courtesy of Dan Habib

Naomie Monplaisir Photo courtesy of Dan Habib

The Rhode Island premiere of the film will be free and open to the public at Rhode Island College on Thursday, Oct. 11, at 5:30 p.m., with the filmmaker, New Hampshire-based Dan Habib, leading a panel discussion after the screening.

Academy Award-winning actor Chris Cooper narrates the documentary, which, in addition to Monplaisir, profiles a Massachusetts high school student making the transition to adulthood and a man who works as a teaching assistant at Syracuse University.

Monplaisir, now 27, changed course in her life because of the landmark Olmstead consent decree in Rhode Island, the first settlement in the nation which enforces the integration mandate of the Americans With Disabilities Act specifically for daytime services for adults with developmental disabilities.

For Monplaisir, a Providence resident who enjoys singing and dancing at her Haitian Creole church, the 2014 federal consent decree has meant a chance to pursue the job of her dreams rather than being shunted off to a sheltered workshop after high school.

Monplaisir will participate in the panel discussion after the screening, along with her brother, Steven Monplaisir, and Kiernan O’Donnell, Associate Director for Vocational Services at the John E. Fogarty Center of North Providence. The Fogarty Center has provided Monplaisir with supported employment services.

“People with intellectual disabilities are the most segregated of all Americans,” said Habib, who is affiliated with the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire.

Nationally, he said, “only 17 percent of students with intellectual disabilities are included in regular education. Just 40 percent will graduate from high school. And of the 6.5 million Americans with an intellectual disability, barely 15 percent are employed.”

In Rhode Island, the percentage of adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities working in integrated settings was above average, at 27 percent last March, according to the latest Annual Day and Employment Survey of the Sherlock Center on Disabilities at Rhode Island College.

But that figure is dramatically below the general population’s participation rate in the national labor force, which was 68 percent last March, Habib said.

The screening, at the Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts in Sapinsley Hall, will be hosted by the Sherlock Center, which requests advance registrationfor those planning to attend. To register, go to http://www.ric.edu/sherlockcenter/ilevent.html

Professional Workforce Key to Implementing Consent Decree in Rhode Island

By Gina Macris

Rhode Island faces a crisis in its inability to recruit and retain a high quality front-line workforce to support people with developmental disabilities. 

The problem - substandard working conditions and low pay in a poorly trained workforce plagued by high turnover - must be resolved if the state is to implement a landmark 2014 consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice that requires dramatic changes in the way services are configured.  

That was the consensus Feb. 23 during the start of a two-day conference at Rhode Island College, where some 75 employers, researchers, state officials and family members brainstormed about how to jumpstart a new way of doing things – and getting the funding necessary to make it happen. 

Maria Montanaro, director of the state Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH)  wondered aloud if her agency could shift funding in the short term to roll out a high-quality pilot program demonstrating the need for better funding of the entire system.                                                               

With perhaps a quarter of the state’s 20 private developmental disability providers participating, she said, the pilot program would offer better salaries and training to motivate staff to show ways that services can be changed to support individual needs rather fit people with developmental disabilities into existing programs.  

That change is a pivotal element in requirements of the Consent Decree that mandate individualized supports in community-based settings.    

Montanaro said a successful pilot program would yield research data that could be leveraged into advocacy for increased funding system-wide during the2017 General Assembly session.  Such a pilot program would not require legislation, she said.  

Montanaro responded to a presentation at Rhode Island College (RIC) by Amy Hewitt, a Minneapolis researcher with a national reputation in identifying effective practices for helping people with intellectual and developmental disabilities live and work in their communities. 

Hewitt, director of the Research and Training Center on Community Living at the Institute of Community Integration at the University of Minnesota, set the tone for discussing advocacy strategies that are based on research statistics gleaned in the implementation of new policies.  

She was hosted by her counterpart in Rhode Island, A. Anthony Antosh, director of RIC’s Sherlock Center on Disabilities, which is charged through the consent decree with showing the way toward greater community integration.  

Montanaro said, “We have to get the advocacy voice mobilized in Rhode Island” so that the message of the disability community gets to the legislature “in a cogent and compelling way.”  

She said she is in a position to speak to Governor Gina Raimondo, but in the executive branch, “they’re responding to the legislative temperament.”  

Governor Raimondo’s latest budget proposal, now before the legislature, asks for some additional funding for developmental disabilities. To a greater degree, however, it would shift residential supports from expensive group home care to less costly shared living arrangements in private homes and use the savings to support employment and other community-based activities.  

The state also could leverage additional Medicaid money in creative ways to provide community-based services, Montanaro said.  

Mary Madden, the state’s new interim Consent Decree Coordinator, noted that expanding the use of Medicaid money still would mean convincing the state to pay for half the new funding.  According to Medicaid rules, the federal government pays for about 50 percent of allowable services, as long as states pick up the other half.  

Hewitt, meanwhile, said legislation and litigation drive public policy, with lawmakers responding only when the the data backs up the argument for change.  

 “The happy stories are not going to get money,” she said. Policy makers don’t make decisions based on the “feel-good stuff. That’s the realist in me talking. They make decisions based on unmet need” that is supported by statistics.  

“We expect the direct service professional to be a little bit of everything,” Hewitt said, referring to the formal title of front-line worker.

The job encompasses the role of teacher, nurse, psychologist, occupational and physical therapist, counselor, nutritionist, chauffeur and personal trainer all at once, she said. 

Yet direct service professionals are paid an average of a little less than $11 an hour in Rhode Island, she said. 

“You have to figure out a way” of changing perceptions so that “these people are not thought of as workers but professionals,” she said.  

The workforce problem in the field of developmental disabilities runs nationwide, Hewitt said.  

“No state has solved this problem, but there are few states further along the path,” she said.  

Hewitt offered a myriad of statistics that link training, supportive supervision, and decent pay to a stable, high-quality workforce that makes a difference in the lives of people with developmental disabilities.  

She is to return Feb. 24 to serve as a resource as the group of about 75 works on specific strategies for stabilizing and improving the system in Rhode Island.  

The conference participants are mostly senior officials of the private agencies that provide services to almost all the 3600 people with developmental disabilities in Rhode Island.  No front-line staff attended.  

Pam Goes, the mother of an adult with developmental disabilities, said families need to be included in policy-making and advocacy statewide.  

“Right now families feel isolated and apart,” said Goes, who is also a former family support director at the Trudeau Center in Warwick.