Disability rights advocates split over closure of Lanterman center

The Lanterman Development Center in Pomona cares for people who are developmentally disabled. It’s named for Frank Lanterman — the Republican lawmaker who was the driving force behind changes in California’s care of the mentally disabled in the 1960s.

He fought to improve care at state-run facilities. Now the one that bears his name is due to close. At a recent Sacramento hearing, advocates for the disabled were split over the closure.

More than half of Lanterman’s 390 residents are over 60 years old. Nearly all have lived at the Pomona facility for their entire lives.

“Why change that at this time and point in their lives?” Terence Green asks.

For more than a decade, Green has been in charge of residents' care. He worries that closing Lanterman will upset them — maybe even be enough of a shock to shorten their lives. He says he’s especially worried about one 50-year-old woman with Down syndrome.

“I always see her when I come to work at five,” says Green, “we hug and she smiles. She’s just standing there in her bare feet. She’s getting ready to get dressed. She’s going to miss all the staff members that have taken care of her all of these years — always been the same people.”

California’s Department of Disability runs four centers — but can’t afford to keep all four open. Lanterman — with more than 1,000 on staff — costs the most. It spends roughly $300,000 a year to care for each resident. Lanterman’s resident population is also the smallest — and it gets smaller by about 10 percent a year.

That population decline reflects a shift in thinking about what developmentally disabled people need.
Evelyn Abouhassan, with the nonprofit Disability Rights California, says they need the freedom to make their own choices.

“They should be among their peers, in the community, integrated with the community as a whole.” says Abouhassan. “That’s the way we’ve been moving as a society and that’s the way it should be.”

A few years ago, the state closed Agnews — a developmental center in Northern California. Evelyn Abouhassan says many of the residents moved to community facilities — and blossomed.

Charlet Coco’s daughter, Chris, lived at Agnews.

“She had no say as to any part of her life” Coco recalls. “She didn’t get to say when she wanted to get up, when she wanted to go to bed, what she wanted to eat, what she wanted to wear."

Chris responded with multiple outbursts a day Coco describes as, “kicking, scratching, biting, destructive behaviors to property.”

Coco worked with nonprofit groups and local government agencies to set Chris up in the community.
Chris — who’s now 33 — has a house in a Sacramento suburb and manages a staff she helped hire. She shops, cooks for herself and enjoys a packed social calendar.

Charlet Coco says Chris seldom lashes out the way she used to. Coco says when Chris was institutionalized, she looked forward only to weekends at home with mom.

“Now I go to pick her up from her own home.” Coco beams. “We go out in the community for a couple of hours. She tells me she wants to go home — to her home, not my home — to her life.”

Moving from institutional to supported living in the community empowered Chris. But Lanterman staffers worry their older residents won’t cope well with the closure.

Sue North with AFSCME Local 2620 — the union that represents most of the workers at Lanterman — says it’s a different era now.

“We do a better job now of integrating people with developmental disabilities in the community, and they don’t need to go to places like the state developmental centers anymore” North explains, “but we still have a population that lives in those developmental centers, who didn’t get the benefit of special education. They didn’t get the benefit of day care that was designed for children with mental retardation.”

The Department of Developmental Services says it won’t close Lanterman until everyone’s placed in a new facility — or moved to supported living in the community.

But Lanterman’s Terence Green says no matter how the state handles the closure, the residents will suffer.

“It would be as if I came to your home and said, 'Sorry, you can’t live here anymore. We’re going to take you out to the desert. We have a nice group home for you and hope you do well out there.”

Terence Green thinks the state should let Lanterman’s residents live out their lives at the place they call home. Decades ago, says Green, California promised them lifelong care — and he says it should honor that promise.