Year 2000 Priorities

The coming year will see some interesting new work at P & A, as well as lots of the consistently good representation you have come to expect of us. On September 29, 1999, P&A's Board of Directors approved the agency's priorities for fiscal year 2000, these priorities will control the types of individual cases we will accept as well as the systemic changes we will seek over the next year. In some ways, the priorities are similar to priorities set for the agency in previous years, but in other ways, they are very different.

One significant change has to do with a recent Supreme Court decision stating that persons with disabilities cannot be unnecessarily institutionalized. Our Board of Directors asked P&A to study whether the ADA's "integration mandate" is being violated at specific psychiatric facilities in New Mexico, with a view towards pursuing less restrictive community alternatives for people who are unnecessarily confined.

We are also focussing our efforts on assisting residents of psychiatric facilities to obtain job opportunities on discharge, and looking at one psychiatric facility's practices around rights restrictions that are linked to behaviors.

Another new area of priorities relates to the agency and Ombudsman Project. Our focus of work in this area will be to obtain good service plans and to address rights violations for people with brain injuries or developmental disabilities in certain kinds of residential programs.

In addition to new priorities, P&A is continuing its efforts to investigate incidents of serious abuse, aid students who have been illegally excluded from schools, assist certain employees who have been discriminated against, help people get less restrictive guardianships, pursue grievances against medicaid managed care organizations and dozens of other objectives that we hope will help to protect and promote the rights of people with disabilities.

These priorities come at the end of a three year planning cycle. Beginning with fiscal year 2001, we will develop a whole new set of goals for the agency - and we will be looking for your help as we do so.