Rated
May 03 2007
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1 review
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health, florida, disabilities, personal
• miamiherald.com
From the page: "Budget cuts hurt kids who need help most
BY FRED GRIMM
fgrimm@herald.com
Charlie Crist saw the wretched disregard the agency afforded young Kevin Estinfil and recognized the power of a single narrative.
Last December, the governor-elect saw in Kevin a 12-year-old in state care suffering from cerebral palsy, blindness, fluid on the brain and a profoundly diminished mental capacity, a symbolic victim of the old regime with a reputation for heartless intransigence.
The state's Agency for Persons with Disabilities had refused to pay $360 for a year's supply of thermal blankets for Kevin, though without them his body temperature would plummet. And APD spent thousands fighting a lawsuit, rather than spend that piddling amount.
Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman charged APD with ''a failure to demonstrate even one iota of caring or compassion for children.'' Her angry words must have caught someone's ear in Tallahassee.
The governor-elect ordered his lawyers in the attorney general's office to abandon their defense of the lawsuit. Crist himself wrote a $360 check for the blankets. And he rewrote Kevin's story into a political parable, adding the kindly new governor to the narrative." [
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This article was emailed to me by my dear, long-time "real world" friend and mentor, Sue Cannon. I miss her and the whole Cannon family terribly. Shortly before my family left Florida, Sue accepted the position of State Parent Consultant with Florida's
Early Steps Program. If she and her crew ever get sick of living in Hurricane Land I hope they'll take my husband and I up on our relocation offer. Heaven knows that special needs kids/families in this section of the Ozarks need more resources and dedicated advocates like her.
