Community Class: Know Your Rights
New York State makes a beautiful promise about how Self-Direction will be person-centered:
“You will get to pick your own activities, staff and schedule when you self-direct…” OPWDD website.
We want New York State to live up to that promise. The official guidance has only a few exclusions. However, since November 2022 unofficial “red flag” policies and new exclusions have been invented, which make it more and more difficult to get approval of “Community Classes & Publicly Available Training/Coaching.”
We have created a KNOW YOUR RIGHTS DOCUMENT and GRIEVANCE PROCESS COUNTER ARGUMENTS (see PDF’s below) which details your rights, and we are working to create a “match-making” service between people who have been denied classes, and people who can help you. What we can tell you about your rights will change over time.
By tracking the progress of people actively challenging decisions, we are learning more with each passing month.
New York State has announced that they will soon issue an Administrative Directive Memo (ADM) on this subject.
We might not get immediate relief, but we must speak up to bring change. Don’t be discouraged. Even when we appear to lose, we are winning, because it supplies us with evidence of the lack of recourse.
