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Governor Inslee's proposed budget before leaving office included the closure of Yakima Valley School and Rainier School, and Governor Ferguson has said he plans to include these closures in his own round of cuts.
Two bills have been introduced in the legislatore to close them (HB 1472 / SB 5393), and they could reemerge if the House and Senate decide via their respective budgets that they want to close the RHCs, and we'll know about that when the budgets drop the week of March 24.
The bills would be the vehicle to make what's in those budgets happen, and we don't know if there would be any hearings on those bills. Our work over the next month or so is to convince the budget writers that we can't afford to close these life-saving facilities.
Send a message to decision-makers now.
Over 100 Adults with Profound Developmental Disabilities Hang in the Balance
The adults with developmental disabilities who call these facilities home face displacement, trauma, homelessness and even mortality.
Yakima Valley School is a skilled nursing facility with 35 permanent residents. YVS also has 12 crisis stabilization and respite beds available. Rainier has 72 residents in the ICF, and those beds are intended to help residents transition to a community placement.
The stays are supposed to be temporary, but many of the clients are there because no community placement would accept them or they lack the resources to care for them.
Closing Rainier and YVS would eliminate 645 jobs, eliminate 127 beds, and force 119 disabled people to move in order to save $15.6 million.*
Even a modest 1% wealth tax on those with wealth exceeding $100 million, which would be paid by approximately 3,400 individuals, could generate $10.3 billion in the next 4 years. That alone would nearly eliminate the budget crisis.
And yet lobbyists for billionaires and big business are in Olympia every day trying to convince our elected officials to cut deeply and do nothing to address our upside-down tax code.
Care You Can't Get Anywhere Else
Residential habilitation centers (RHCs) Yakima Valley School and Rainier School serve adults with the most severe intellectual and developmental disabilities, providing round-the-clock care, access to skilled medical professionals, and behavioral support that community-based systems are ill-equipped to deliver.
Aside from uprooting fragile individuals who deeply rely on routine, moving residents into community care settings would put them at risk of neglect, inadequate treatment, or worse.
“Unfortunately, my biggest fear is that they will end up homeless,” says Brittany Barber, a member of WFSE Local 491 and an investigator at Rainier School. “They don't belong just sitting in a hospital. They don't belong sitting in jails.”
Community-based providers are already stretched thin. For residents with such complex needs, these closures could mean losing access to skilled caregivers and being forced into unsafe, unstable, or unsuitable living environments. For many, these facilities are their only option.
Families rely on the stability and expertise of Yakima Valley and Rainier Schools to care for their loved ones and are devastated by the possibility of closures.
“There's people in the community waiting for placements, people stuck in hospitals. That's inhumane,” said Mary Ann and Lloyd Baker, whose daughter is cared for at Fircrest, one of the four remaining residential habilitation centers.
“There's no other facility in the community to support them,” they said. “Our daughter lived in a community placement and she self-abused herself so badly she had to be hospitalized. And at the time Fircrest provided infirmary with respite. You would not ever find that in the community. If it weren’t for RHCs, our daughter would probably have been in a hospital emergency room for years. There's nothing out there.”
The Need for RHCs is Only Increasing
In 2018, the legislature requested (ESSB 6032, pp. 118-122) that DSHS/DDA engage the William D. Ruckelshaus Center to create a workgroup to study RHC and intellectual/development disability (I/DD) issues.
They found that while many DDA individuals live with family, an increasing number will require publicly financed care as their caregivers age.
The consequences of closing RHCs has also become clear. It's a matter of life and death.
After the Frances Haddon Morgan Center was closed in 2011 in favor of a shift toward community-based care, a former resident died after ingesting liquid laundry detergent.
We need to call on legislators to reject these proposed closures and instead focus on maintaining and modernizing these vital facilities.
Together we can Save Rainier School and the families and residents who depend on it. We need to speak with one voice to our elected officials: Don’t balance the budget on our developmentally disabled community members.
Send a message to decision-makers now.
Residents at Yakima Valley School and Rainier School rely on WFSE members every day. Legislators need to understand what's at stake.
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* Inslee’s outgoing budget documents claim a savings of $30.1 million from closing Rainier School, and $9.6 million from closing YVS in the 25-27 biennium. However, the Inslee budget also adds $24.1 in new spending to add capacity in the community (this could include SOLAs). As such, the actual net savings is $15.6 million.
