PRINTABLE PAGE

Burned and Ignored

Boy’s plight should focus attention on group homes

Originally published in the Fayetteville Observer, July 22, 2001

“Privatization” is all the rage in government. But the investigation of the treatment of an autistic boy at a local group home reminds us why public oversight remains essential for protecting the most vulnerable among us.

An employee of the group home in Cumberland County has been charged with felony child abuse. These are the circumstances as they have been described:

The 12-year-old boy who had wet himself somehow ended up receiving first- and second-degree burns from a clothes iron. The burns were on his arms, shoulders, hands, elbows and bottom.

If that sounds horrible, it gets worse.

The child was burned sometime after 11 p.m. But it wasn’t until 5 the next morning that his painful burns were discovered when other staff took him to the bathroom. He can’t speak. Then it wasn’t until 3:30 p.m. that day that he was taken to a doctor to receive treatment for his injuries—or so a medical clinic’s records show. This was after detectives and social workers visited the home following an anonymous call. They were told the boy had already received treatment that morning.

Adding outrage to this injury, the group home staff waited two days to fill a doctor’s prescription for burn ointment.

The agony that boy endured must have been indescribable. Since the boy can’t speak, he can’t tell anyone.

But people in this community should speak up for him.

The violations found at the home at 7311 Avalon Drive a year ago would have been enough, in the judgment of most folks, to shut it down or require near-constant outside watchdogging.

The home was cited in the past for failing to provide proper care plans for residents, for failing to fill and administer prescriptions, having only one change of clothes for a child, for failing to document violations, and for employing inadequately trained staff. The man charged with the abuse had once been convicted of armed robbery.

In fact, Betty Gardner of the state Division of Facility Services’ Mental Health Licensure Certification Section said it’s not unusual when group homes hire people with criminal histories, but that “no one with a violent disposition should work around children.”

Nor, we might add, around the elderly or the infirm. But caretaker jobs don’t pay handsomely. The care of the retarded, the autistic, and the severely mentally ill is costly, and government funding to care providers may not cover enough expenses to make it profitable without cutting corners large or small.

Taking the problem beyond this one group home, the federal government is lately looking into whether North Carolina has been too slow to send the mentally ill to their local communities to be served. The General Assembly my close Dorothea Dix Hospital. Sooner or later, those patients, who are unable to care for themselves, will be sent back to their communities.

But where? To decent long-term facilities and well-regulated group homes with specially trained personnel?

Or to profit-oriented programs of the worst sort where people who can’t speak up for themselves might be subjected to a living hell?

One can only wonder what might have happened to the retarded and autistic boy suffering from burns if one anonymous caller hadn’t cared enough about him to pick up a telephone and dial the Department of Social Services.

Questions surrounding one group home shouldn’t reflect badly on all group homes. One boy’s injuries shouldn’t indict all caregivers as negligent or abusive.

But in the rush to “privatize” the care of the most vulnerable, North Carolina residents and legislators must remember this child.

With so many small group homes dotted around this county, and elsewhere in the state, North Carolina and the federal government should have a clear idea of how they will be able to protect children like him—and other vulnerable people—in a real, rather than in a haphazard, way.