Woman with disabilities enjoys sunny days, but funding cloudy

Sitting tall and straight on her folding chair at a long table in a workshop in an industrial park in Palatine, Laura Hill scans a room filled with people just like her.

"I like to be back," says the 42-year-old Rolling Meadows woman whose IQ has been measured at a far-below-average 36. "My friends, I hadn't seen them for a long time, Burt. Yes, Burt. I said, 'Hi,' yes, I did. Really happy to come back, yes."

When Laura and I last chatted six weeks ago, the state budget crisis had just taken away funding for Laura's participation in the Clearbrook sheltered workshop program for adults with mental disabilities. Laura, whose cortical dysplasia keeps her with the mental abilities of a small child who repeats things over and over, had been going there five days a week for 22 years.

Then, the July 1 budget cuts pushed her out.

"I couldn't come back. I got cut. A budget cut," Laura told me then. Without her program, Laura spent every day with her 79-year-old mother, Dorothy Hill, in their ranch home in Rolling Meadows. A caretaker all her life, Dorothy raised 10 kids and took care of her husband, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at age 35, required a wheelchair since 1969 and was a quadriplegic when he died in 1987.

Dorothy knows how to care for Laura but admits that her daughter's attitude changed without the workshop in her life.

"I noticed she was getting, I wouldn't say antsy, but she was a little more hard to handle, and she's never hard to handle," Dorothy says. "She didn't know what to do with herself. She was so out of sync. She colored. We did some learning cards, 'A is for apple' and things like that, but she wasn't interested."

Shopping trips, where the couple spent only time, and television filled the void.

"We watch cooking when we can get her away from 'SpongeBob' and the Cubs games," Dorothy says.

With the General Assembly restoring most of the funding temporarily, a much happier Laura returned to Clearbrook last week.

"She just changed like night and day (when she learned) that she was going back," says Dorothy. But there is no rest for the mom, who hired a professional to help her wade through the sea of red tape in her attempts to find funding for Laura that won't be subjected to the political whims of Illinois legislators.

"You have to be on Medicaid to get a PUNS number," Dorothy says authoritatively before adding, "I have no clue what it means."

The Prioritization of Urgency of Need of Services number is just another part in the puzzle and no guarantee, says Carl M. La Mell, president of Clearbrook. When funding returned, the nonprofit agency offered jobs back to the 25 staff members terminated, but a $150,000 budget reduction resulted in a transportation cut that still has more than a dozen adults with disabilities unable to find a way to return to Clearbrook, La Mell says.

Laura's funding should be safe until Dec. 31 or maybe the end of June.

"We have assurances that it probably will last the rest of this fiscal year, but we also have doubts," La Mell says, explaining how moving her funding into a program that draws some federal reimbursements could help. "There are a number of options out there, all of which, in my opinion, are uncertain. But I am cautiously optimistic."

Laura's excitement is unbridled.

"I like to be back," Laura says often.

"It was a long six weeks. The clients who did come back are very happy," says Ilene Rosenberg, Clearbrook's director of employment services. She pulls out a paper listing one of the emergency options for families left without funding.

"I just filed this away on Friday, thinking hopefully we'll never have to go through this again," Rosenberg says.

Laura hopes things stay the same.

"Oh, she's a happy kid now. She really is," Dorothy says.

But the ever-vigilant mother will spend the fall jumping through hoops and filling out paperwork to find other funding.

"She'll probably be let off again in January. That's why I'm working so hard on this other thing," Dorothy says. "It's a long, hard process, but I'm willing to do it because I don't trust the state anymore. You can't."