Home Alone Thanks To The Efforts Of Social Workers, A Number Of North Idaho’s Developmentally Disabled Are Staring New Lives Outside State Hospitals

Bob Balser tore everything, even the clothes that irritated his skin. His room at the Idaho State School and Hospital in Nampa was necessarily bare, his drawers locked, his furniture rubber.

His was a life plagued with vision problems, seizures, autism and severe mental retardation. Nothing short of death could pull him from the state institution’s protective embrace, his file suggested.

But the file was wrong.

Two years ago, Balser, now 49, moved into a Coeur d’Alene apartment with an equally developmentally disabled roommate, 37-year-old Greg Bodily.

Balser smiles now and dresses himself in jeans, polo shirts and tennis shoes. He neatly folds his clothes and tucks them into his bureau; he sleeps below a huge unprotected poster of a red sports car on his wall. He drinks from breakable glasses.

“When we looked at who’s gained the most after leaving the state hospital, it’s Bob and Greg,” says Kim Densley, Coeur d’Alene’s branch manager for S.L. Start and Associates.

“I didn’t think they were ready, but their life is so much better that they’ve flourished.”

An agreement between Idaho and the federal government moved Balser, Bodily and hundreds of other adults from institutions and group homes in July 1995.

The plan was to improve individual long-term care conditions for up to 432 adults at any one time using federal Medicaid money and Supplemental Security Income from Social Security.

Improvements ranged from hiring extra caregivers to establishing residents of the state school and hospital in community-based apartments throughout the state.

Fifty-seven of the adults in the program live in the Panhandle. Three hundred people statewide are waiting for their chance to participate.

“People with disabilities want the same things anyone else wants out of life,” says Tim Voz, North Idaho’s manager for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s developmental disabilities program.

“They want choices, friends. They have human needs and rights.”

The state school meets the needs it can, he says. But one staff member typically looks out for a dozen patients.

Residents there socialize with each other. Someone prepares their food, pays their bills, even picks out their clothes in some cases - and in so doing robs them of their purpose for waking each morning.

Seven people who left the state school in 1995 to try supervised apartment living in Coeur d’Alene are among the most severely disabled adults in the state, Voz says.

All have IQs below 75 and multiple physical and/or behavioral problems. They need help with basic living skills most people take for granted, such as speaking, bathing and eating.

All take medication. A few have unpredictable tempers.

“We had concerns,” says Reed Mulkey, discharge coordinator for the state school and hospital. “Treatment teams wanted to be sure these people received the services they need and that the community would be protected as well.”

Idaho-based care agencies had no interest and little experience working round-the-clock with the severely disabled, Voz says. So he offered the care contract to the Spokane-based S.L. Start and Associates Inc.

The 18-year-old agency has offices in Lewiston, Sandpoint, Yakima and Spokane. Washington’s Division for Developmental Disabilities has contracted with S.L. Start since 1980 to relocate hundreds of severely disabled people from institutions to community-based programs.

“It’s easy to say we want to do this,” Voz says. “But day-to-day living is very difficult if you don’t have the right care providers.”

Cost was a big issue. Care at the state school and hospital runs about $430 a day per patient. Under the new program, clients would pay their living expenses and rent from their Supplemental Security Income, which averages $480 per person each month.

Their low incomes qualified them for state subsidies that help with rent.

Health and Welfare combined part of its budget with federal Medicaid money to cover the contract for full-time care with S.L. Start.

The agency handles more than home health care. It teaches clients how to run their own lives, albeit with help.

Full-time care for the most severely disabled clients - with one caregiver for two patients at the most - costs $200 a day.

In June 1995, S.L. Start opened an office in Coeur d’Alene, complete with classrooms. A week before the program started, Densley and her crew went to Nampa to learn about their seven new clients.

“I remember sitting there with Bob’s whole team - 12 therapists and doctors,” she says. “They said he has a passion for ripping things. They said when we decorated his apartment to use no glass, put nothing on the walls and buy rubber furniture.”

Balser was not their most challenging client. He was unaware of his disabilities.

But severely-retarded Annie Dolan was painfully self-conscious.

At 35, the dark-haired woman was physically fit and just mentally acute enough to recognize how she differed from others. She knew she was missing out on life’s gifts to “normal” people, and she was fighting angry.

Dolan’s parents were hesitant about her move.

They’d tried to keep her close to them in supervised apartments and group homes. They moved her to the state hospital in 1993 after she hit someone.

“Annie had lived in the community for years and wanted to come back,” Densley says. “Her reputation was the largest challenge.”

Charles Ouldhouse, 28, was in the same boat as Dolan. He’d lived in foster and group homes and in the state school most of his life. He wanted more from life and was as explosive as Dolan.

The four patients rounding out the Coeur d’Alene group needed more personal care than Balser, Dolan and Ouldhouse but less supervision.

One was born with water on his brain, was slightly paralyzed and needed a wheelchair. Others were profoundly retarded.

“S.L. Start assured us that no matter how difficult the clients became, they wouldn’t send them back,” Mulkey says. “We were skeptical.

“We’d been told that by lots of caregivers in the private sector, and we’ve gotten clients back as soon as they exhibited behavioral problems.

“But S.L. Start has been good to their word - and they’ve been challenged to the fullest extent.”

Densley assigned caregivers full time to each two-bedroom apartment, which at first were all in one Coeur d’Alene complex. She advised them against posting official memos or anything that would diminish the apartments’ hominess.

She found warm, comfortable furniture and televisions and decorated Balser’s apartment as she did the others.

She arranged transportation to bring the group to S.L. Start during the day for therapy and living-skills classes.

It was tough at first. Neighbors complained about the constant traffic to the four apartments.

Ouldhouse was evicted.

Balser tore off his clothes, tried to leave with the state workers who brought him and broke a few of the glasses Densley stacked in his kitchen cupboard.

Bodily rocked on his feet constantly, wore only sweatsuits and snatched food from his roommate.

S.L. Start persevered. Neighbors’ complaints died out over time. Caregivers found Ouldhouse an apartment in Post Falls and dressed Balser again and again until he grew accustomed to the feel of clothes.

They taught Balser and Bodily to choose their own outfits. As the two men became accustomed to the freedoms in their new surroundings, they calmed, and Balser kept his clothes on.

“He was petrified when he got here,” says Tammy Miller, one of S.L. Start’s supervisors. “Now he prepares food, pours, stirs, loads the dishwasher. His growth has blown my mind.

“If he’d gone through a children’s program, he’d be near independent by now.”

Ouldhouse regrets that he lost his temper with his first landlord.

“I learned if you get along with people fine, they’ll get along with you fine,” he says.

At the state hospital, Ouldhouse dreamed of his own apartment, pizza parties, and gatherings of friends, Mulkey says. When the eviction threatened to end his dream, Ouldhouse decided to work hard to keep his temper in check.

“I can stay up as late as I want. I can use the phone when I want because it’s mine. I can go where I want. I’ve got friends, too,” he says. “I get more freedom.”

He rides his bicycle from Post Falls to Coeur d’Alene most of the year, shops at the mall, eats out and attends church every week.

“There’s no way I’d go back (to the state hospital),” he says, shaking his head firmly. “I like the people here better. These guys are nice to me.”

Ouldhouse’s girlfriend moved in with him, which the state hospital doesn’t allow. Marriage would have cut into their financial support, so the couple bypassed the paperwork and committed to each other in their own ceremony.

“I’m happy. I’m married right here,” says Ouldhouse, tapping his heart.

His mother, Holly Stoolfire, is a religious woman and doesn’t approve of cohabitation. But that’s her only complaint about her son’s new environment.

The apartment is good for him, Stoolfire says. She lives in Troy and doesn’t see him often but speaks to him by telephone twice a week.

“Group homes are fine. This is better,” she says.

“He’s his own boss. He’s in good shape. He’s learning things normal people can’t do. I think he’s a lot happier.”

Dolan was so accustomed to being taken care of that living on her own was a pleasing shock. Voz loves to tell the story of Dolan’s first day in her new apartment to show the program’s value.

“She asked if she could have a banana, and the staff said, ‘It’s your house. Go ahead,”’ he says. “She got her banana and said it was the best one she’d ever tasted in her life.”

Dolan wears a black leather jacket, motorcycle boots and black knit gloves and goes by the nickname Fonzie, after Henry Winkler’s cool character on “Happy Days.” She has no roommates, but a caregiver lives with her to help with the little things.

“I like to have my free time, take a nice, warm, relaxing bath, eat, take my meds,” Dolan says. “Sometime I’d like to do my own laundry. Sometime.”

She decorates for every holiday and keeps her apartment spotless. Her mother, Mary Dolan, says her daughter’s behavior has improved since she moved into her own place.

“She’s much calmer and talks about how much she likes living there,” Mary Dolan says. “We’re extremely grateful for these young people who do these great things for her.

“They just won’t give up on her. They’re bound and determined to make this work.”

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