Parents fighting plan to move disabled adults back to N.J.

Carmine Galasso/Staff Photographer

Howard and Barbara Zimmermans son David has lived in a full-service facility for people with Down syndrome in New York State for 54 years.

In the 54 years since a doctor told his parents he was, in now-outdated and rejected terminology, a mongoloid idiot with no hope for a normal life, David Zimmerman has lived in a place he and his family have come to consider his home. Until recently, they expected him to finish his years there.

Zimmerman, who has Down syndrome, had a roommate he considered his best friend for decades. A nurse he sometimes called Mom. A rabbi who encouraged him to celebrate a belated bar mitzvah.

David Zimmerman in 2002, with his mother in his room at Pathfinder Village in upstate New York.

Now, as the 57-year-old sinks into a dementia that his family expects to evolve into Alzheimers disease, the state has told him that he has to move.

Zimmerman is one of 700 adults with developmental disabilities the state wants to transfer from out-of-state residential communities where it has paid tuition for decades back to New Jersey under a plan officials say will save money and make it easier to monitor individual cases. But his family, like dozens who are facing the same transition, question the value of a move they say would upend Zimmermans life and potentially threaten his already fragile health.

Fearful and distressed by the states plan, the family describes the idea of transferring Zimmerman in dire terms.

Its basically a crime that they can think of doing that to a person, said Zimmermans father, Howard, of Livingston, who has vowed to fight the move. How can you move a child after 54 years in a home?

The plan, called Return Home New Jersey, is one component of sweeping changes in the way the state provides services to people with profound disabilities, a process that also includes closing two state-run institutions. Its initiative to move as many people as possible into smaller, community-based treatment centers is aligned with a widely embraced belief that people with such conditions as intellectual disabilities, autism and cerebral palsy, who cant take care of themselves, would do better in their own communities, closer to their families. Its a philosophy states have been encouraged to adopt by federal reimbursement priorities that support treatment in community settings in a shift away from the isolation and potential for neglect or abuse in large institutions.

Continue reading here:
Parents fighting plan to move disabled adults back to N.J.