Kansas City Star says state must address the ongoing needs of its disabled citizens

From The Kansas City Star Editorial Board:

It’s become a fixture of Kansas legislative sessions. Children and adults with mental retardation and other developmental disabilities, along with their guardians, pack the halls of the Capitol and plead for help.

With good reason: More than 4,100 Kansans are on waiting lists for residential and home-based services. Missouri, with more than twice the population of Kansas, has a waiting list of about 4,500.

Waiting means delayed therapy for children whose social and physical developments depend on services. It means idleness for young people who have finished school and are shut out of job programs. It means unending stress for families seeking a group home placement — or even respite care — for a disabled adult. Many Kansans have been on hold for more than four years.

“If we had a 4,000-person waiting list for kindergarten this year, someone would do something about it,” said Tom Laing, executive director of InterHab, a statewide advocacy group for people with disabilities.

He makes an excellent point. Public schools and universities have clout in Topeka. So do business groups. And farmers.

Kansans with disabilities get sympathy, but they don’t have clout. Lawmakers from both political parties agree the waiting lists are a blight. But still the situation festers.

Waiting lists are only part of the equation. Woeful state funding has eroded the capacity of the community-based system that cares for the 10,000 disabled children and adults who receive services.

Direct-care workers — the people who help disabled Kansans with functions like cooking, eating, toileting, dressing and transportation — on average receive a paltry $8.83 an hour.

As recently as the late 1990s, no developmentally disabled Kansans waited for services. But the past decade has been disastrous for the state’s most vulnerable citizens.

Former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, did not make funding for developmentally disabled Kansans a high priority. Neither did her Republican predecessor, Bill Graves.

Prompted by a lawsuit, funding for elementary and secondary education dominated the legislative agenda for much of the decade. Lawmakers in 2006 finally agreed to put nearly $500 million into public education over a three-year period.

Before the start of the 2007 legislative session, leading lawmakers examined the plight of the developmentally disabled. They correctly discerned that the state needed to simultaneously get more people into services and increase financial support for the system. They recommended a $70 million increase over three years.

The House passed a bill affirming the recommendation. But momentum died in the Senate.

Meanwhile, lawmakers did manage to approve a generous $30 million increase in ethanol and biodiesel subsidies that session.

Maury Thompson, executive director of Johnson County Developmental Supports, made one of his frequent trips to Topeka in March 2008.

“I have been around long enough to see, year after year, the issue ‘du jour’ taking precedence over the needs of the developmentally disabled,” Thompson said. “I simply ask that that not occur one more year.”

Funding for the disabled that year barely kept pace with inflation. But among the issues du jour was a reduction in corporate income taxes worth $158 million over five years.

Kansas’s fiscal situation this year was miserable. But federal stimulus money brought hope. Aid to states included $71.5 million in Medicaid funds.

Lawmakers could have used the money to expand services for the developmentally disabled. Doing so would have put people to work and increased the state’s revenue base.

But a bill to accomplish that was shelved. Agencies that help the disabled now face the awful prospect of actually removing services from families.

It’s a question of will. Small fixes won’t solve a problem that has spiraled out of control.

Gov. Mark Parkinson and Kansas lawmakers will face daunting budget challenges when they return in January to Topeka. Nevertheless, they must resurrect the three-year, $70 million plan that legislative leaders proposed back in 2007. It should be at the top of the priority list, not the bottom.

A state’s character is defined by how it treats its weakest citizens. By that measure, Kansas has much work to do.