Finally, received today a statement from the DBHDS legal coordinator explaining the rationale behind the change in the group home definition: “the rationale for the change in the definition of group home was to assure that residents in the group home receive 24 hour supervision… If live in staff is tasked with supervising residents 24 hours a day, there is no way residents are receiving 24 hour supervision as the staff must sleep at some point.”

As expected, this rationale in no way provides a justification for the actual change that was included in the draft regulations.

1. Current regulations already provide the mechanism to accomplish this objective; as the current regulations clearly require 24 hour supervision in group homes and group homes that are not adequately staffed to provide 24 hour supervision (because the live in person must sleep) are already in violation. The licensing specialist who regularly reviews staffing plans would be able to include this rationale in their findings and present the offending home with a corrective action plan under the current system – that would resolve this concern without any changes whatsoever in the definition of group home.

2. The proposed change is extremely excessive given this rationale, as the proposed change would prevent live in staff from providing any of the services or supervision over the 24 hour period, which is clearly not warranted by the supposed rationale provided.

Clearly, the rationale provided does not warrant this proposed change and provides further evidence that the rationale is merely a pretext for efforts to undermine the live in group home model, which has been so valuable to small independent providers. DBHDS has repetitively demonstrated a clear hostility to this model as a part of their overall campaign to favor large bureaucratic providers and eliminate small independent providers, which will be detrimental to options and services. Ignoring that this change would be redundant in achieving the stated objective and deciding to try to sneak by language that goes way beyond the stated rationale to make live in group homes impractical either: demonstrates lax procedures and inadequate deliberation in making proposed changes are a conscious effort on the part of the department to disadvantage the live-in group home model. If they want to put us out of business they need a better reason than this and to be more forthright in their efforts.