Sunday, February 26, 2006

"We don't have bad people, we've got bad habits."

-- Marsha Thompson, interim administrator of the District's Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Administration.

MS. THOMPSON was referring to a newly released report by Elizabeth Jones, a court-appointed monitor of residents with mental retardation in D.C. group homes. The report, prepared for a judicial hearing next Thursday, found that the District has made "little meaningful progress" in improving conditions for group home residents and that the health and safety of residents remain in jeopardy because of a host of program failures. Ms. Thompson told The Post's Karlyn Barker that it is a hard job "to break old habits and old ways of thinking." If that is the administrator's analysis of the problem, then the dysfunction within the disabilities agency is far worse than we thought.

The list of chronic deficiencies -- including unsafe housing, poorly trained staff, bad nutrition, lousy supervision and inadequate care resulting in a series of deaths -- is about as old as the nearly 30-year-old class action lawsuit that put the agency under court supervision. When unsanctioned and clearly condemned behavior is repeated with regularity, as has occurred within the city's network of taxpayer-funded group homes for three decades, the problem is far more serious than just a case of "bad habits." It's more that too many of the wrong people are in the wrong jobs and committing wrongs against some of the District's most vulnerable citizens.

Ms. Thompson, who described her agency's performance as pitiful but "less pitiful" than when Ms. Jones was preparing her report, has to do more than produce "up to the minute statistics" on her agency's progress for a March 6 oversight hearing to be conducted by D.C. Council member Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4). Turning the agency around requires turning over jobs to people qualified to perform them. That isn't the case today, as it wasn't in prior years, despite perennial pledges by a succession of mayors, including incumbent Anthony A. Williams (D), to improve care for group home residents. Frankly, it's difficult to have much confidence in an administration that falls so far short on pledges it makes to a court. Explaining the Williams administration's failure to meet court deadlines for improvements, Brenda Donald Walker, deputy mayor for children, youth and family issues, told The Post: "We over-promised, and we fell short. We are still moving on our commitments, but it has proved to be a lot more complicated than we had anticipated."

How much time is needed? From The Post: "D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams has promised to overhaul the system, vowing reform in the wake of Washington Post reports documenting 116 deaths since 1993 in homes for the mentally retarded. The reports detailed chronic complaints about the level of care." The date? April 6, 2000.