Former Ambassador Andrew Young speaking to students at Atlanta University Center earlier this year (photo credit: Rebecca Grapevine).
ATLANTA – Georgia should establish special economic prosperity planning districts for its 10 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), a bipartisan state Senate committee recommended Thursday.
The proposed HBCU Innovation and Economic Prosperity Planning Districts would help the colleges address critical needs and increase engagement from the surrounding communities, said committee chairwoman Sen. Sonya Halpern, D-Atlanta. Areas of focus might include housing, digital infrastructure, small business and workforce development, and environmental and facility upgrades for the institutions and their communities.
“We have heard time and time again that [HBCUs] are real economic drivers for the state,” Halpern said. “But we’ve also heard there’s a lot of opportunities yet in front of our HBCUs to be better supported in their infrastructure. … This would be an innovative approach to begin to corral the asset that we have as our HBCUs … and use [them] as a real catalyst for the communities in which they sit.”
The General Assembly would need to approve legislation creating the planning districts as a first step.
The study committee also recommended that the Georgia HBCUs produce a biennial report focused on how various state agencies can support the institutions. The reports would be authored by a third-party organization and focus on how HBCUs can benefit from state resources, including funding, contracting opportunities, and technical assistance. The proposal is modeled on a similar effort in Tennessee that has been successful, Halpern said.
The committee also recommended creating an HBCU Caucus within the General Assembly. The bipartisan, bicameral caucus would be modeled on the HBCU Caucus in Congress.
The committee also recommended creating HBCU subcommittees within both the state Senate and House Higher Education committees. This would provide a dedicated forum to discuss HBCU problems and potential legislative solutions, Halpern said.
The study committee held several meetings this fall and listened to testimony from experts, HBCU officials, and alumni.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Georgia should add 2,400 slots for serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in their homes and communities in next year’s budget, a state Senate study committee recommended Wednesday.
“We’re looking at hopefully being able to eliminate the waiting list over a three-year period,” said state Sen. Sally Harrell, D-Atlanta, co-chairwoman of the committee.
The waiting list currently has more than 7,000 people on it.
The program pays for support services for people with an intellectual or developmental disability so they can remain in their homes and communities and not languish in large institutions.
Increasing the funding for the program so that the waiting list can be cleared has long been a priority of the disability advocacy community, and the study committee’s recommendations may be the crucial first step toward decreasing the length of the waiting list.
The study committee, which held several public meetings this fall, grew out of a resolution passed earlier this year that aimed at addressing the waiting list and other problems faced by Georgians with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The panel adopted 14 recommendations on Wednesday.
Key among them is that Georgia set up a special commission devoted to improving services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities along the lines of the state’s Behavioral Health Reform and Innovation Commission. That commission, formed in 2019, spearheaded the drafting and passage of a sweeping mental health reform bill earlier this year.
The intellectual and developmental disabilities commission would include not just legislators but key staff members from state agencies, experts, family members and people who have developmental or intellectual disabilities.
Georgia should also consider refining how the waiver waiting list works, the study committee’s report suggested. The waiting list should take into account people’s current and future needs, their current supports, age, region and other factors. The list also should be made more transparent so the public can better understand how it works.
The committee also issued several recommendations for addressing the state’s shortage of direct-support professionals, the frontline workers who help disabled people with daily tasks and other support.
The shortage in the field is due in part to the low pay for the job. The committee recommended increasing wages in fiscal 2024, noting that pay should be sufficient for workers to cover transportation and housing.
The committee did not provide a specific amount for the wage in the report. However, the state Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities (DBHDD) recently issued a draft report suggesting the rate for direct support professionals be raised to just above $15 an hour.
Sen. John Albers, R-Roswell, the committee’s other co-chairman, said he thought $15 would likely not be enough to address the worker shortage, especially given recent inflation.
“We know that our end goal is not yet achieved [with the $15 recommendation],” he said. “[But] this is advancing the ball.”
The report also recommended the state consider finding a way to add retirement, health-care and other benefits for direct support workers to incentivize entering and remaining in the field. The state should also consider adding a professional credentialing process for direct-support jobs.
The committee also suggested the state find a way to pay family members who act as caregivers for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Another suggestion included in the report is that Georgia consider shifting medical care for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to a managed-care model currently used in many other areas of health care. The state would pay a private insurance company to provide medical care for people in the program.
If the state wants to move forward with the idea, the report recommends first setting up a pilot program enrolling about 1% of the people who need the services, around 130 to 150 Georgians, to test out whether the managed-care model would deliver quality care for this population.
“We are so grateful to everyone who came forward and told their stories,” Harrell said. “Each story helped to highlight a different piece of the puzzle. Once we put that puzzle together, it was clear that this community is in crisis with tremendous unmet needs.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Federal prisons are failing to prevent and properly investigate sexual abuse of female prisoners, according to a new report released Tuesday by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
Male employees abused female prisoners in at least two-thirds of federal prisons that housed women in the past decade, the investigation found. The abuse was often persistent and ongoing – and it often went unaddressed.
“This situation is intolerable,” said U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., the subcommittee’s chairman. “Sexual abuse of inmates is a gross abuse of human and constitutional rights and cannot be tolerated by the United States Congress. It is cruel and unusual punishment that violates the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution and basic standards of human decency.”
“We found that BOP [the federal Bureau of Prisons] has failed to prevent, detect, and stop recurring sexual abuse, including by senior prison officials,” Ossoff added.
He gave the example of a prison in Dublin, Calif., where both the warden and chaplain sexually abused female prisoners. The prison was even known as the “rape club” by both employees and women incarcerated there.
At the Dublin facility, the officer in charge of ensuring compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act was himself abusing prisoners, Ossoff noted.
At a prison in Florida, all female prisoners were transferred out two days before the required prison-rape inspection, ensuring that they could not report their abuse to the auditors and allowing the prison to be deemed compliant with federal law.
Three formerly imprisoned women told the committee they did not report ongoing abuse by prison employees because they feared retaliation and had little faith anything would be done.
Carolyn Richardson, who lost her vision while in prison and needed special medical treatment, was abused by a prison guard tasked with taking her to and from appointments.
“I was in an extremely vulnerable state, physically, mentally and spiritually due to my medical condition, and [the guard] preyed on this fact,” she testified.
Richardson said the prison guard brought her foods and medicines she could not otherwise obtain.
“I felt utterly powerless. I was a vision-impaired prisoner who was relying on [him] for basic life needs and transportation to medical appointments,” she went on. “I was terrified that he or other BOP staff would retaliate against me or take away my privileges. … I thought that the officers would stick together.”
Briane Moore described how she looked at her prison sentence for dealing drugs as a chance to start her life over. She tried to be on her best behavior so that she could get a transfer to a prison closer to her home and young daughter. A prison officer took advantage of this.
“He told me that if I didn’t follow his orders, he would interfere with my transfer. He then raped me,” Moore testified. “I knew he had the power to prevent me from being transferred to a prison closer to my family, closer to my daughter. … I had no choice but to obey.”
Moore and the other women described the long-lasting effects of the sexual assaults on their mental health.
“I’m here today five years later, and I want you to know that I’m still suffering,” she said. “This has changed the course of my life forever. I’m a different person physically and emotionally because of this. I’m still in mental health treatment. I’ve lost trust in the system.”
Officials from the Department of Justice (DOJ), where the BOP is housed, described what had gone wrong and how they plan to fix it.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz said prison camera systems should be improved, noting prison staff are able to take advantage of their knowledge of locations that lack cameras to assault prisoners.
Horowitz also testified that many employees smuggled drugs and other contraband like cell phones into the facilities to groom prisoners for future sexual abuse. He said the BOP should finalize a policy first proposed in 2016 that would amp up searches for contraband among employees.
Horowitz also recommended that Congress upgrade the penalty for smuggling contraband into a prison from a misdemeanor to a felony.
Both Horowitz and BOP Director Colette Peters said their departments have increased resources for investigating sexual assaults and have made the issue a top priority.
Peters, who took over the BOP in August, said the bureau has increased the number of employees dedicated to investigating sexual abuse allegations and improved reporting procedures. It has set up a dedicated email address where people can confidentially report abuse.
Peters said the bureau now requires all reports of sexual abuse to be sent to its Office of Internal Affairs and not just the prison’s warden so that the bureau can more accurately track the problem and look for patterns of abuse, including by people like wardens and chaplains.
Despite the recent attention and efforts to address the problem, the investigation found there is still a serious backlog of cases at the Bureau of Prisons, including hundreds of sexual abuse allegations.
“BOP must address its backlog of outstanding cases involving employee misconduct,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the subcommittee’s ranking minority members. “Delays in accountability — particularly for individuals who have committed sexual violence — are unacceptable.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA — The state Department of Education (DOE) has identified 175 low-performing schools that need additional support to improve student performance for the 2022-2023 school year.
In good news, 57 schools exited the list for the year. This is the first year the state has updated the list of schools that will receive additional support since 2019 due to the data limitations imposed by the COVID pandemic.
The schools are all Title I schools – schools where at least 40% of the students are from low-income families. The schools are identified as needing either Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) or Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI).
Schools are typically selected for the CSI list if they have very low performance on the state’s College and Career Ready Performance Index (CCRPI) or a graduation rate of less than 67%. This year, the DOE modified the selection process due to the COVID pandemic, focusing on progress on English-language learning and school readiness.
The 116 CSI-designated schools will receive additional support directly from the DOE’s Office of School Improvement. The schools are eligible for additional funding and receive specialist leadership and instructional support.
The 59 TSI schools will receive additional support from their school districts along with targeted assistance from the DOE. These schools are chosen based on the presence of a demographic subgroup performing in the lowest 5% of all CCRPI components.
While many of the schools are located in metro Atlanta, schools on the lists come from across the state and across grade levels. The program is part of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act Congress passed in 2015.
“It is our responsibility as a state to provide the support all schools need to improve,” said State School Superintendent Richard Woods, who was recently re-elected to his third term in office.
Woods emphasized that the designation is not meant to be punitive and that the schools on the lists faced serious challenges from the pandemic.
“Being identified for CSI or TSI support does not mean these schools are not making progress,” Woods said. “Over the last several years, our schools have faced enormous challenges beyond their control, and school leaders, teachers, and families have worked hard to get students back on track.
“CSI and TSI identifications allow us to come alongside these schools to ensure they have the resources and support necessary for academic recovery.”
“It was good to see that [the DOE] did consider progress, not just the standardized test scores but providing support for… students who are English-language learners and also considering students’ readiness for school,” said Lisa Morgan, president of the Georgia Association of Educators. “We know that our students in Title I schools face additional challenges due to circumstances beyond their control.”
“It is important that we change the language and the references we make around these issues…I think it is important that we’re not labeling schools [as failing], and therefore, educators, students and families,” said Morgan. “It’s important that we keep our students front and center and that the focus be on supporting students and the educators that are working with them every day, so that all of our students can be successful.”
Georgians can view the lists and learn more about the programs on the state DOE website.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
Pharmacist Ira Katz of Atlanta’s Little Five Points Pharmacy holds fentanyl test strips (left) and Narcan (right). He is able to distribute the life-saving drug Narcan for free through a partnership with the Atlanta Harm Reduction Coalition.
ATLANTA – As overdoses have skyrocketed in Georgia – more than 13,000 this year alone, according to the state Department of Public Health — so has demand for the life-saving drug naloxone, which reverses the deadly effects of an opioid overdose.
People who use drugs – or those who are frequently around them – are encouraged to keep naloxone on hand. It comes in several different forms, including as a liquid that can be injected and a nasal spray. The drug can almost instantly bring someone back from an overdose but will not harm a person if they have not overdosed.
But the miracle drug isn’t cheap. A two-unit box of Narcan, the nasal spray version of the drug, costs at least $45. That puts a strain on local governments, nonprofit organizations, and drug users who want to make sure the lifesaving drug is easily accessible.
The drug can be even more costly for consumers who want to purchase it at a pharmacy. It ranges between $40 and $143 at Atlanta-area pharmacies for a box of two units of the nasal spray, according to drug-pricing website GoodRx.
The cost is further compounded by the influx of the potent opioid fentanyl, which is now found mixed in many types of illicit drugs. Fentanyl-fueled overdoses require more naloxone to treat than past non-fentanyl overdoses, observers from across the state noted.
Whereas in the past, two units of Narcan may have been enough to keep someone alive until emergency services arrived, now one overdose may require four, five, or even six units, said Ira Katz, an Atlanta pharmacist.
Katz has sought to circumvent the high costs of naloxone by forming a partnership with the Atlanta Harm Reduction Coalition. His Little Five Points Pharmacy, located in the heart of an artsy and alternative neighborhood that draws visitors from across the state, hands out the drug for free.
“We want to do what we can to try to make it affordable,” said Katz, who has personally reversed overdoses at least seven times. He said the pharmacy gives out about 10 to 12 boxes of the drug per day, and he has people drive in from all over Georgia to get it.
Sometimes, pharmacists can give out free samples of the drug to those in need, said Jonathan Marquess, a vice president of the Georgia Pharmacy Association.
“We should never have anyone walk in a pharmacy and not be able to get a Narcan prescription,” Marquess said, either because the pharmacy does not have the drug in stock or because of cost.
“The numbers have gone up dramatically in the last few years,” said Robin Elliott, a co-founder of Georgia Overdose Prevention, a group that mails free naloxone kits out across the state.
Last month alone, the group distributed almost 2,600 kits. It sent out 28,000 in a 12-month period. Because it has a limited supply, the group tries to target those who are at highest risk and who are uninsured, Elliott said.
Other community groups across the state also distribute naloxone for free. Access Point of Georgia, a nonprofit group that serves Athens-Clarke, Oglethorpe, Madison, and Jackson counties, has had 337 overdose reversals reported so far this year, said Riley Kirkpatrick, the group’s founder. That number is likely an undercount, Kirkpatrick said, since not all overdose reversals are reported to the group.
Many law enforcement officers and first responders carry the drug with them. For example, Jackson County’s emergency services has attempted 172 reversals so far this year, said Tim Grice, assistant director of Jackson County Emergency Medical Services.
“[Cost] is always on our mind,” Grice said, though the county has had sufficient supply so far.
Local groups and governments should begin to see some additional financial support for distributing naloxone due to the influx of funds from the state’s opioid lawsuit settlements. Last year, the state announced it would be receiving almost $17 million from a settlement with global consulting firm McKinsey for that company’s role in promoting the drugs.
Georgia will use around $2 million from the settlement to supplement emergency service providers with the drug starting this month, said Eric Jens of the state Department of Public Health.
The department has also launched an Overdose Response Kit pilot project in locations where overdoses may occur, including restaurants, bars, and hotels. The project will install kits that include instructions about how to use naloxone, said Jens.
Money from the McKinsey settlement and other sources funds the purchase of more than 70,000 units of the drug for distribution via community groups and events, the Georgia Overdose Prevention Project, and local public health departments, said David Sofferin of the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities.
Another $1 million from the McKinsey settlement has been allocated to the Georgia Harm Reduction Coalition to help distribute naloxone in communities across the state, he said. The agency trains law enforcement officers and first responders on how to use the drug.
The influx of the McKinsey settlement money comes on the heels of steps the state has already taken to address the overdose crisis.
A 2014 law provides legal amnesty to anyone who calls 9-1-1 after an overdose, shielding someone trying to get help for a friend or family member who has overdosed from legal prosecution for drug use. In 2017, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, then-commissioner of the Department of Public Health, issued an order that essentially gave all Georgians a standing prescription for naloxone, obviating the need to see a doctor.
During the last legislative session, the General Assembly approved legislation that removed fentanyl test strips from the list of illegal drug paraphernalia. The test strips help users determine whether their drugs have been mixed with potentially deadly fentanyl.
At the federal level, the Food and Drug Administration is moving to fast-track an application from Narcan’s manufacturer to make the drug available over the counter as soon as next year. That could help bring down the drug’s price as competition increases, said Mary Sylla, director of overdose prevention and policy for the National Harm Reduction Coalition.
It’s essential to make sure the drug is available everywhere, including schools, sporting venues, restaurants, government buildings, and places of worship, said Jeff Breedlove, chief of communications and policy at the Georgia Council for Recovery. He would like to see naloxone become as common as the defibrillator kits widely available in public places today, and he praised Delta Air Lines’ decision to ensure each plane has naloxone available on board.
“Government, business, and faith leaders have to accept the reality that overdose deaths are at historic highs, that their constituents and customers are dying and families need their help to save lives,” Breedlove said. “Forty-five dollars [the cost of naloxone] is a lot less money than the cost of a casket.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
