Supreme Court declines to hear IEP video recording case
Plus: Maine rolls out new Lifespan waiver to smooth transition to adulthood; Alaska sued for taking too long to sign up disabled children to Medicaid
Medical Motherhood’s news round up
Snippets of news and opinion from outlets around the world. Click the links for the full story.
• From USA Today: “Supreme Court rejects dad's appeal to record school meetings about autistic son's needs”
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to weigh in on a case about whether parents have a constitutional right to record meetings with school officials about their child's education.
The court rejected an appeal from a father who wanted to record a meeting to discuss whether extra support was needed for his autistic high school son.
The school district in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, said Scott Pitta could audio record, but not video record, their online meeting.
The case drew support from conservative and libertarian groups, who argued that school meetings are similar to traffic stops or police arrests: government actions that they believe are covered by a right to record and share information.
[…]Pitta contested the school’s written summaries of previous meetings and wanted to record their next Google Meet video conference. He said audio alone wouldn’t capture who was speaking. A complete record was needed if Pitta wanted to fight a service denial.
He argued people should be able to record any of their interactions with a government official, comparing the accountability provided by a video recording of a school meeting to that of a police officer’s body camera. […]
• From the Alaska Beacon: “Alaska’s Medicaid backlog triggers lawsuit”
On a life-flight from Fairbanks to Anchorage, Sierra Ott’s newborn son Liam would not stop bleeding from a routine needle prick.
Doctors in the Anchorage neonatal intensive care unit diagnosed him with a blood clotting disorder. Without medication, he is at risk of extreme joint pain and even bleeding out from what would not normally be serious injuries.
Ott said that without health insurance from her husband’s military service, the pills would cost the family about $8,000 a month.
At the urging of her case worker, Ott applied for Medicaid for her son’s disability. Liam will have to take the medication for the rest of his life, and she wanted to make sure there would never be gaps in his coverage. In addition to bleeding, hemophilia can cause debilitating joint pain. Ott applied last October.
She is still waiting.
Her family is one of thousands caught in a backlog of Medicaid applications in Alaska. “I know that we’re not the only family who has been waiting for answers that are just not coming,” Ott said.
The Otts filed a class action lawsuit against the state on Thursday with the Northern Justice Project, a civil rights law firm that represents low- and middle-income Alaskans. It alleges the state has failed to provide timely access to Medicaid to eligible Alaskans who have a dire need for health care coverage.
[…]James Davis, Jr., a founding partner for the Northern Justice Project, said they took on the case because he is fed up with dysfunction in the state agency, which has wrestled with backlogs of crisis proportions since 2022.
[…]He said his firm gets about a call a week from families with disabled children that have waited months for the state agency to give them a Medicaid determination. “That entire time they can’t get their children medical coverage,” he said.
• From News Center Maine: “Maine is building a new system for children and adults with disabilities”
Maine is building a new system to ensure that one of the state's most vulnerable populations receives consistent care.
The Lifespan Waiver is expected to clear a backlog of hundreds of children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and provide new programs.
But some parents whose children have spent years waiting for housing and support worry they won't get the care they need.
The waiver program would start providing services to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities at age 14 to help them move from school-provided services into adulthood without losing that care.
"That has been the vision of Lifespan since day one: not to have gaps, not to have people fall off the cliff," Betsy Hopkins, the associate director of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services Office of Aging and Disability Services (OADS), explained.
[…]Hopkins said the goal of the Lifespan Waiver is to clear all the waitlists for waiver-funded services in five years.
More than 2,100 people are on a waitlist for Section 21 services, the highest level of support for people who need one-on-one supervision in residential housing.
[…]While [mom Lisa] Wesel supports expanding and adding new services, she questions how a new care system will become a reality if barriers like workforce shortages persist.
"There needs to be more direct service providers, there needs to be more case managers, and there needs to be more housing, accessible housing barely exists," Wesel explained. […]
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