By Morris Malakoff, JTNews Correspondent
After nearly a quarter century in operation, Shalom House, an adult group home with a capacity for up to six Jewish residents coping with cognitive disabilities, will close its doors at the end of March 2009.
The decision to close the Wallingford home, which is staffed 24 hours a day and serves both developmentally disabled individuals as well as those with prolonged mental illness, was made by the Seattle Association for Jews with Disabilities on June 18. SAJD is a subsidiary agency of Jewish Family Services.
“The decision was a difficult one,” said Gail Mautner, who chaired an SAJD task force that spent the past five months examining the services provided by Shalom House as well as the cost of maintaining the facility. “The final decision to close Shalom House turned out to be based on best practices that would serve the community more effectively.”
It also was driven by the relatively small Jewish community in the region and the corresponding small numbers of individuals needing the more intensive services provided by an adult group home.
“We did a survey that indicated that, in the area, there is a population of approximately 5,000 individuals with cognitive disabilities. Of that number, only about 150 require some level of services for daily living tasks,” said Don Armstrong, director of Professional Services for JFS. “But the number who need a full-service adult residence is quite limited. Many others are being cared for by family or are in other facilities.”
Shalom House has thus found that its services, which are offered only to Jews, have been sometimes underutilized.
“We had a vacancy a few years ago that lasted 18 months,” said Armstrong. “We advertised in the community with no response. In the end, that vacancy was filled by a resident whose family moved them here from Tennessee.”
Modern practice finds that living arrangements for those with cognitive disabilities track those for other populations needing assistance with day-to-day tasks such as shopping, transportation, minor medical care or financial management. Just as many elderly no longer reside in traditional nursing homes in favor of assisted living facilities or in-home assistance, so too do many of those who would have in the past been likely candidates for residency in Shalom House. Independent living arrangements are the accepted normal course for a vast majority of adults with cognitive disabilities.
The declining community need and the migration to independent living for many of those with cognitive disabilities led SAJD to conclude that Shalom House was not the most efficient use of resources. That means a nine-month transition for the current residents and their families to alternative facilities, for which SAJD will be providing assistance.
But the closing of Shalom House means that those same financial resources, which amount to approximately $370,000 annually, will now be available toward the Supported Living Program. That program, also operated by SAJD, allows individuals to live independently while receiving the help of caseworkers and other providers. Unlike Shalom House, with its service geared specifically toward Jewish residents, the Supported Living Program is open to the broader community. Currently, it serves 44 clients.
According to Armstrong, the Supported Living Program is tailored to the clients’ specific needs, rather than providing the blanket of services of a group home.
“It is an efficient model for [the] delivery of service that fits the reality of how most of our clients prefer to live,” he said.
In the Supported Living Program, specific services such as help with shopping or transportation are provided on an individual basis as needed.
With the transition from maintaining an adult residential facility underway, JFS CEO Ken Weinberg cautioned that the changes made to SAJD programming do not diminish the obligation to provide support to those with cognitive disabilities. He pointed out that the repositioning of resources that in the past would have been allocated to operate Shalom House doesn’t equate with an evaporating of the needs for SAJD services, nor is it a cue to the community to stop supporting SAJD.
“It is easy to ignore [the] needs of this particular set of clients because most of us are not personally touched by someone with these issues, like we are with the elderly,” he said. “This change does not mean that the need is gone or that the community can now move on and pretend these people do not exist.”