User:Woozle/blog/2009-02-17 1913 Social Services Catch-22
|
Social Services Catch-22 2009-02-17 1913
|
We can't get the service we requested because we should be using another service we can't get.
This started before I started blogging here, so I'll recap:
On 2009/01/27, we received a notice from The Durham Center that they were reducing Josh's service hours for the second time that month, from a level which was already iffy.
We sent in a complaint the next day, following the included instructions. The form didn't have any place to explain why you're complaining; it's just official notice that you are, in fact, disagreeing with their decision. We were presuming that dialogue would happen later, in which we could ask them to translate their bureaucratese into English and we could answer whatever their objection turned out to be.
Today, this arrives in the mail. They basically say "you disagree? too bad, we still think we're right even though we don't know why you disagree" -- but the part I especially love is this:
I would strongly consider a group home placement until CAP funds are available for him.
[facepalms] DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA, LADY, HOW HARD WE'VE BEEN TRYING TO GET HIM INTO A GROUP HOME????
Oddly, though, this feels like a tiny bit of forward progress, in that we have someone officially saying that he does in fact need a group home – which suggests that this is a reasonable goal to have, when it was beginning to seem like a bit of a pipe dream.
Or maybe this is just my rampant inner optimist getting carried away again.
The latest thing we've been told to do, towards getting Josh in a group home, is apply for SSI. We applied for... SSI, or SSDI, or something... over a year ago, and were turned down for reasons which haven't changed... but we've also received a lot of conflicting information about whether that reason is as hard-and-fast as they made it sound, or even whether we applied for the right thing.
So that's in the queue of Urgent Things To Do (where it won't be lonely). Now we just have to work out when we have a block of 2-4 hours to go sit in the SS office... or maybe there's a way to make an appointment? Research is needed. Putting this little item on the queue has apparently resulted in my being unable to concentrate on the things I was working on beforehand, yet not able to summon the energy to actually go look into making an appointment.
Sometimes writing about these things unclogs the pipeline, though, so we'll see what happens next. Tomorrow is supposed to be our first more-or-less normal day since last Thursday, so maybe.
- Follow-up: 2009-02-18 email to The Durham Center