Review decision to return funds for job training

Advocates for Kansans with disabilities are correct in calling for the Legislature to review a Brownback administration decision to return $15 million in federal funding for a disabled employment program. Though it is too late to get the money back this fiscal year, at least lawmakers can make sure the administration doesn’t make the mistake again.

The administration returned the funds in August without making any announcement.

“No one knew about this,” Mike Oxford, executive director of the Topeka Independent Living Resource Center, told the Kansas Health Institute News Service.

Michael Donnelly, director of rehabilitation services at the Department for Children and Families, said DCF returned the money because there wasn’t enough demand for vocational rehabilitation (VR) services, which he credited to the improving Kansas economy.

But advocates for the disabled and organizations that provide training are baffled.

“The number applying for VR services was down only 16 percent. Yet they gave back 60 percent of the federal money,” Rocky Nichols, executive director of the Disability Rights Center of Kansas, told the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Nichols contends that rather than return the federal money, DCF should have used some of it for outreach to people with disabilities or to increase reimbursement rates to service providers.

Low reimbursements are why KETCH in Wichita stopped providing VR services a little more than a year ago.

“It just got to a point where we couldn’t keep doing it for what they (DCF) were paying,” KETCH president and CEO Ron Pasmore told KHI News Service.

Others suggest the drop in people seeking services is because of frustration with the slow process of applying for and receiving help, which can take months.

The more likely reason why the state returned the money is that it required a one-fifth state match. Thus, returning the $15 million saved the state about $3 million.

Donnelly denies that the state’s budget problems influenced the decision. But he said it could be a “waste” of limited state money to use it to leverage federal money that wasn’t needed.

That’s a different message from one the administration presented last year, when it proudly announced a new multi-agency push (which is still being developed) to help more Kansas with disabilities get jobs. Donnelly noted during that announcement that about 80 percent of Kansans with disabilities aren’t involved in the workforce.

“That’s a lot of people,” he said.

A year later, DCF returned most of the VR funding without telling anyone.

This story was originally published December 10, 2015 at 6:07 PM with the headline "Review decision to return funds for job training."