Ryan Jones

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

What led to this?
Now that a bit more has come out about this case, I feel I can now comment on it. Read the latest from today's Standard Times. Before I begin, I need to stress a few things. I know Ryan Jones personally. I have had him as a client; his family are friends with my family; he plays on a Special Olympics Unfied Softball Team with me; I have known him for 12 years; I consider him a friend. I am by no means defending the reprehensible actions he is accused of, actions he understands that are wrong. I also don't want to downplay the death of Valerie Oransky, a woman I also knew through business contacts, charity events, and in my previous profession and a job developer for persons with disabilities. Her family has my condolences.

I will be reposting this at two other blogs. The Bristol MA Free Press (a psuedo news blog centered around Bristol County, MA), and The Wand of Wonder (a multi-contributer, free from blog, with 25 or so members of different backgrounds).

Ryan as stated in the article "was a special needs student". While not getting too much into here personal medical diagnosis (or lack there of), Ryan is a person with disabilities; slight cognitive development issues; and some mental illnesses (probably some undiagnosed). Ryan as a person is very quiet, almost painfully quiet, reserved, and lacking good social and communication skills. He is the type of person, that if you asked him how he was doing, he would respond in a quiet monotone "fine", and not expand on it. It takes him a while to warm up to you, and you need to be very direct and to the point talking with him if you want to find out information from him. He was known to have some anger, and possible explosiveness, but in the decade plus I have known him, I only saw it once, and it was easily redirected by myself. He does not do well with criticism, nor does he like to fail. He is a big guy, around 6', maybe 230lbs. Fairly strong (I have play wrestled with him and played football with him) but not overso. In the field, he would be labelled as "Very High Functioning" and is one of the most capable of the person with disabilities I have worked with. Ryan is one of those clients who falls through the cracks of this state's system, as told in a previous article I wrote.

Ryan graduated school as a 18 year old. In this state that can be the kiss of death for person's with disabilities. Becuase of his intelligence level (high boderline) he did not qualify for DMR services. He also was not "mentally ill enough" to qualify from DMH services. Because he gradutated early (or on time), he lost the chance for some services. He spent next few years floating around until he qualified for CBES services. The plus to CBES is that they are long term services as to opposed to regualar MRC job placement services which last about 6 months (but can be reopened). They pay a hourly rates based upon service hours to the program that is award the contract. Quickly, MRC contracts out assesement, job development, placement, and support services to a local program who is exepected to carry out the needed services. As I stated, most of the time those services are temporary, unless it is a CBES client. Luckily Ryan was one, and even more luckily, Ryan came to my former employer, The Opportunity Center/Work Inc, and worked with me, someone he already knew and trusted. He came into those services sometime around 1999 - 2000.

So Ryan came to be my client. His first year with me was spent assessing his skills, and he was eventually placed in a seasonal job at a golf course, which he more than successfully completed. It was during this time period, Work Inc. absorbed The Opportunity Center (OC). What occured that last year of my employment at the OC was a travesty, and Ryan was part of that. Beyond the acutual destroying of the reputation that we had built up by the OC, other things occured. At that time I was servicing 10 - 15 CBES accounts. Doing all the job counseling, development, and billing. I would bill the local MRC office, and the check would come to the OC. The VP at Work Inc who was responsible for "changing the OC to the Work Inc way", came to visit, and met with me and my boss. She wanted to know, refering to the CBES clients, why I was servicing clients for free. It was pointed out the her, that we were getting an hourly rate, and we were billing locally. Of course they were upset they were not getting the billing, but the contract was specifically for the OC and not Work Inc. The next visit was to complain about the hourly rate. You see MRC CBES contracts are front loaded, you get the higher portion of the contract for the beiginning services. Big money comes first, and then it go down to a $25 hourly rate for long term supports services. Work Inc was not happy with that rate, and compared the DMR clients hourly rate of $60 an hour.

These were two different programs, DMR paid you whether or not the client was even in the program $60 an hour, 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, for the entire years. DMR clients also were lower functioning so tended to need longer term and more extensive supports. CBES paid $25 for each hour you spent with the client, minimum of a hour. I was told, that this option was not finacially viable. So imagine this, $25 per hour, from an average of 6 hours per week, for each of 10+ CBES clients. That comes to $1,500 per week. That almost $80,000 a year. Work Inc was at most paying me half (including benefits, mileage, etc.) of that. This does not count the initial payment of $1000's of of dollars per client from vocational training and job develoment. That $40,000 was not worth it? Free money? For at the time a organization that was fincially strapped? Well needless to say, a six months after Malach left Work Inc. for greener pastures, they gradually dropped all the CBES client, including Ryan. Since no one else locally was contracted to do CBES, those clients who could not get other funding, no longer had supports.

So that leaves Ryan, who was now working at Old Country Buffet, with no support. No job coach, no counselor, no ride, no nothing. And here we are 3 years later one person is dead, several lives affected. Ryan is the type of guy to hold his emotions in, he will not actively tell you his problems. He will hold them in until he explodes. Again, if you talk to him and counsel him, this you can get the issues out, this type of behavior can be redirected and you can help solve his problems. He did not have this support any longer. According to his co-workers ha had been talking about killing Ms. Oransky for three weeks. No one informed anyone, or took him seriously? There was no one to inform, he had no support. He might no longer have even been labeled as a person with a disability, there was no longer an association with services. Might the prep cook have told someone who was coming by the work place to support Ryan once a week?

If there were supports, would this have occurred. I cannot say no, but I can tell you this. If Ryan had been saying this for about a month, he might have told me, or another counselor a year ago how unhappy he was. In this field two of the most serious things are suicide ideation and homicide ideation. They will immediatley get the things causing this ideation to stop. I am confident that any decent job counselor would have caught this early, nipped it in the bud, and perhaps Ryan would not have even been working there.

Again, I hate to place the blame on other things . . . Ryan is still responsible for his own actions, but I am very angry, this probably could have been prevented. I am angry that a human service organization (Work Inc.) put money ahead of helping a client. It takes some dying or getting maimed in this state, and the ruining of several lives for the issues to be addressed, and that has become much too common. Ryan will probably end up spending the next few decades at Bridgewater State Hospital. Time will tell. Watch this case, there should be some very interesting things that come out of it.

I am Malach, things need to change.