Transcript of “Rights Here, Rights Now – Episode 10: “Post-General Assembly with Colleen Miller Part 1”

Produced by the disAbility Law Center of Virginia.                                                            

[NARRATOR]: The information provided on this podcast does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice. Instead, all information, content and materials available are for general informational purposes only.

[Intro Music: Light rhythmic percussion beats, finger snaps & hand claps]

[REN]: Welcome to Rights Here, Rights Now: The podcast about disability, advocacy, and activism. I’m your Advocate Host, Ren Faszewski.

[VIRGINIA]: and I’m your Advocate Host, Virginia Pharis

[REN]: Every two weeks, we will dig into relevant issues, current events, and avenues for advocacy -

[VIRGINIA]: ‘cause someone has to -

[REN]: It might as well be us!

[VIRGINIA]: This podcast is produced by the disAbility Law Center of Virginia, the Commonwealth’s protection and advocacy agency for disability rights. Find out more at www.dLCV.org.

[REN]: Well how are you doing this fair Friday, Miss Virginia?

[VIRGINIA]: I am peachy. To quote one of my colleagues, “I am peachy amid this disaster that is Corona Virus.” And the world, you know, trying to implode a little bit right now so I need some good news!

[REN]: And you know what, we have some good news. We’ll be talking to the director of the disAbility Law Center herself, Colleen Miller. And she’ll be talking to us about why she’s been gone for two months (laughter) at the General Assembly.

[VIRGINIA]: Yeah, so she’ll be talking to us, this’ll be a two parter and this time around we’ll be talking about some of the really good stuff that happened for people with disabilities, that is hopefully, maybe, probably, almost definitely gonna be law in July.

[REN]: But before we jump into that let’s check out Disability in the News:

[TERRY]: Hello, I’m Terry Smith, I’m an Administrative Assistant at the disAbility Law Center. Vans shoe brand is releasing an Autism Awareness Collection featuring sensory inclusive shoes. The shoes are designed to be ultra-comfortable with calming colors and accessible design features. Vans worked with the International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Educational Standards to design these shoes to be inclusive for those all across the autism spectrum. Shoes come in all sizes from toddler to adult. Vans is committing to donate at least $100,000 to a group called A. Skate, an organization that offers free skateboarding clinics to those with disabilities. Find out more at Disability Scoop.com            

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[REN]: Today we have with us the esteemed Colleen Miller. Thank you for coming.

[COLLEEN]: I’m so happy to be here!

[VIRGINIA]: Welcome back! We had you on briefly before the General Assembly to talk about what that might look like, things we were keeping our ear to the ground for, and now it seems like it's over. Is this session of the General Assembly over?

[COLLEEN]: I think that's a great question. The General Assembly was supposed to end under our State Constitutional guidelines, it was supposed to end on March 7th and it did not. The State legislature had not completed its work on the budget at that point and had not completed its work on some other really important legislation so under the constitution they can extend the date of it and they did. They took a two thirds vote and decided to extend the session until March 12th. So we’re recording this on the 13th. They ended the legislative session the day before we recorded this.

[VIRGINIA]: With the General Assembly finally, just by a hair over, sounds like we have a lot to talk about!

[COLLEEN]: We do! It was a very busy session with the legislature, there was a new sense of leadership. A new party was in control for the first time in 20 years so all of the committees had new chairpeople who had never done this before. All of the sub committees had new chair people and the session I think got off on a really slow start as a result of the change in leadership and then it just went full blast.

[REN]: What were the stats on that? Tell us a little bit, what was the sort of work they did this session.

[COLLEEN]: So over the course of the session they considered almost 4000 different pieces of legislation. That included resolutions and that's the kind of stuff like a resolution to treat March 13th as Virginia Pharis Day (group laughter) those kinds of resolutions. But then there were also resolutions to require studies to be done on certain things. There were about 1000 resolutions that they considered just by themselves and then another 3000 bills. Not all of them got committee hearings. Some of them just stayed in committee and died at the point that they call “crossover” But they did vote on a lot of them and more than 2000 bills actually passed the House and the Senate this year.

[REN AND VIRGINIA]: That’s a lot of bills!

[COLLEEN]: That is a lot of bills and a lot of new things that people are going to have to adjust to. Changes to the minimum wage laws that will be difficult for a lot of businesses to understand and comply with and that's just one out of 4000 bills.

[REN]: I know I was keeping up with the Legislative Highlights and it seems like there were just numbers on numbers and bills on bills every day! Yeah they were quite busy and doing a lot of work, so good for them!

[COLLEEN]: They absolutely were!

[VIRGINIA]: So I think our idea today just because a lot of this is so big this is going to be a two parter following up on the General Assembly. Today we’re going to dive into the things that make us feel good and make us happy because we’re recording on a Friday and I need that! (laughs) And the next time we’ll come back and talk about some of the things that we want to keep working on and keep advocating for and really boost that signal.

[COLLEEN]: That sounds perfect. Where would you like to start?

[REN]: Oh boy! Well you mentioned minimum wage so maybe we should start there?

[COLLEEN]: Minimum wage is, it's an interesting bill for us because you would not think that would have a whole lot to do with disability rights but there's language in our code right now that says you can pay less than minimum wage to people with “physical deficiencies” is the language that we use in the Virginia Code and advocates have long considered that to be very” icky” and I think that's the technical term for it icky! And although the minimum wage act doesn’t do everything we would have hoped to promote full employment for people with disabilities it does at least take that icky language out.

[REN AND VIRGINIA]: Hey that's good news! That's great news!

[COLLEEN]: That is good news.

[REN]: I think the legislative process is slow so it's always good to see this evolution not keeping language from, I don’t know, ‘82. (group laughter)

[VIRGINIA]: That’s being generous Ren!

[COLLEEN]: It’s really interesting to think about how legislation develops. You might recall that last summer and last fall there was a series of articles in the Richmond Times Dispatch about guardianship abuses. There was one particular guardian in Richmond who was counsel for the VCU Health Systems, would represent the VCU Health Systems in guardianship actions and would have himself appointed as guardian. And would then just remain guardian long enough to transfer the person out of the hospital, and once the person was out of the hospital he would dissolve the guardianship. Sometimes concluding the guardianship by threatening that if the person went back into the hospital again, he would become their guardian again.

[VIRGINIA]: That seems super villany!

[COLLEEN]: It was not a good situation and we were really grateful for our friends at the Times Dispatch for exposing this and the legislature responded to that. It responded to the series of articles by passing a bill this year that would restrict somebody from being both the petitioner's counsel and the guardian. Seems like that would have been covered by the Attorney's Conflict of Interest rules anyway but it's now part of the law. So that was a very good development as far as guardianship issues.

[REN]: What about another much requested topic, special education and stuff with disability in the schools?

[COLLEEN]: Some really nice developments in special education this year. Our friends over at The ARC of Virginia have for years been pushing that Individualized Education Plans should include training on social interactions and sex ed for people at their developmental level and schools have been resistant to anything like that. This year the legislation went through and and has already been signed by the governor, that IEPs must consider sex education materials that are appropriate to the person’s developmental level. Really great effort on that one. Our friends over at the Legal Aid Society got some great bills through protecting students with behavioral issues in schools from being charged with disorderly conduct. We’ve seen that for a lot of kids with mental health issues and behavioral issues that if they are acting on their disability they can end up with a criminal charge and the legislature this year removed that possibility. That if it's happening in conjunction with any kind of school conduct, the school is not permitted to bring a charge of disorderly conduct. We’ve also seen some good legislation this year requiring better training to deal with students with disabilities for the school resource officers and that’s been a real serious concern for us because school resource officers can sometimes approach our constituents, our children, as though they’re criminals. They’re now going to get de-escalation training on dealing with kids with behavioral disabilities.

[VIRGINIA]: That’s wonderful because I know we've seen instances in the news where kids with disabilities were getting hurt, they were picking up charges and-

[COLLEEN]: That's right, and these things disproportionately affect kids with disabilities and minority children. So it's really important that the legislature took these kinds of actions this year. We’re looking forward to seeing them take effect in the next school year.

[REN]: Yeah that's super important. I know Virginia has been pushing for law enforcement officers to be trained in crisis intervention training so it makes perfect sense that they would want to continue training de-escalation for kids in schools who are there to learn things.

[COLLEEN]: We did see some good legislation around mental health issues on first responders being trained in what's called “mental health first aid”. And I guess mental health first aid is a specific curriculum so the language actually says, “mental health first aid or a similar curriculum.”

[REN]: Yeah I’ve been trained in it before. It’s very specific about being able to identify, “is it a mental health crisis”, kind of knowing basic de-escalation and how to inform the proper emergency folks to be able to respond.

[COLLEEN]: So we were happy to see that that legislation went through. Each year the legislature extends that just a bit further and requires more and more people to have that kind of training. So I think that is, eventually it's going to be a really good thing. It’s going to take a while for it to have an effect but its a very good thing.

[VIRGINIA]: So I know a couple weeks ago we did an episode regarding voting rights to prepare for the primaries. So do we have any cool voting rights stuff?

[COLLEEN]: We have a lot of great developments in voting rights! For one thing the legislature has changed the requirements around absentee ballots. It used to be that if you were requesting to vote absentee because of a disability you had to specify, first of all, what disability and there were times when we saw local registrars decide that wasn’t a good enough excuse and turn it down because they didn't think that was “enough of a disability”. It was icky! We fought those when we learned about them but often we didn’t learn about them until after the opportunity to vote had passed. This year the legislature has created absentee voting for no excuse whatsoever.

So you don’t have to have any good reason. You can just say you want to vote absentee because you want to. So that’ll be great for our constituents. They also have eliminated the really oppressive voter identification requirements that were passed in recent years. Although it seems like that shouldn’t be such a hard thing to comply with cause we have a driver’s license in our pocket. Not all people with disabilities can access identification like that. Especially, we work with folks in some remote locations in assisted living facilities, for example that can’t easily get to a DMV to get an identification card. So the voter ID requirements were really shutting out people with these complicated issues that prevented them from getting an ID.

The legislature has changed the voter identification requirements now and you can use a utility bill. You can use an expired driver’s license. You can use all sorts of different identifications now to prove who you are and if you don't have any of those things you can just simply sign an affidavit and say this is who I am and if you sign it under penalty of perjury you get to vote.

[VIRGINIA AND REN]: Excellent!

[COLLEEN]: So it's really great for our clients. And then they’ve also made it a whole lot easier for everybody, including people with disabilities, to be able to register to vote. So that will help.

[VIRGINIA]: Are there any other areas of our community that we’ve really seen great changes in terms of in this legislative session, to help them out?

[COLLEEN]: I think there’s been some really good developments with respect to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. In particular, the legislature extended the requirement for insurance coverage for conditions related to autism. They refer to this as sort of like the last hill. Over the recent years they’ve had coverage for autism for large health insurance markets. They;ve had coverage for younger age children with autism and this one closes the last gap. It's even for the small insurance markets and it's for ages into adulthood.

[REN]: That’s excellent! I know that the transition period can be really difficult to find support. I know that's a question we’ve gotten a lot when people have called us.

[COLLEEN]: That's right. We were also pleased to see that the Department of Behavioral Health was promoting legislation that would enable them to do mortality reviews. That is something that we here think of as a no brainer. That they should be able to examine the cause of death for someone who’s been in a facility that's licensed or operated by the state but the department feels like they haven't had the authority to do that. So they did go to the legislature to get that authority and the legislature gave it to them.

[VIRGINIA]: A little bit of a sad thing to be excited about but-

[COLLEEN]: It's a sad thing but it's really critical that we learn from incidents that affect people and we would hope that they could also be studying medical crises and incidents that don't necessarily result in death but still are incidents that we could be learning from.

[VIRGINIA]: So yeah a good first step.

[COLLEEN]: Absolutely. And we also saw some good legislation regarding people with developmental disabilities who are in the correctional system. Delegate Patrick Hope sponsored some legislation to require the Department of Corrections to develop guidelines for dealing with inmates with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Unfortunately we see far too many people with developmental disabilities in the correctional system and the correctional system is clearly not equipped to deal with the kinds of demands that those inmates place on the system. Very glad to see that is to begin as a development process.

[REN]: I mean again kind of bringing it back to a previous topic, I know this is for adult inmates but for children getting charged with disorderly conduct, it keeps them out of facilities that really aren't equipped to manage them or support them.

[COLLEEN]: We see unfortunately people with autism who end up in jail, who end up in psychiatric facilities and these are not appropriate places for them. So it's a battle that we have ahead of us but it's somewhat hopeful that at least the Department of Corrections is going to develop some guidelines on how to respond.

[VIRGINIA]: So for anybody interested in learning about the recently passed bills that we talked about, if people want to read them in their entirety, where would they go to do that?

[COLLEEN]: So there’s a couple ways they can access those. First of all, on our website we have a section called Legislative Highlights and the issues that were before the legislature that we were tracking, and we tracked about 50 or 60 different bills this year, the ones that we were tracking are covered by subject matter in our legislative highlights. So you can open up a Legislative Highlight on Guardianship and there will be a hot link to the bills that we’re talking about there. So that's one way you can access it. You can also go to the Legislative Services website. It's a little harder to use but if you know a specific bill number that you want to follow you can click on bills and resolutions and type that in. There’s a tool that's available on Legislative Services called Lobbyist in a Box and it's available to anybody and you can track up to 5 bills on that and you can do word searches there. So say you want to find out about mandatory outpatient treatment. You can type that phrase in and it’ll show you the bills that dealt with that and you can track up to 5 of them that way.

[REN]: And have these bills already gone into effect? Are they already the law of the land?

[COLLEEN]: The place where we are in the process right now is that the session ended yesterday and the bills that were concluded this week are being sent now to the governor to be reviewed. And the governor and the attorney general can make some changes. Typically they’ll make technical changes, if something isn’t worded exactly right or something. The governor can approve it, can veto it, or can amend it. And when the legislature reconvenes in April, on April 22nd, they can vote on whether to accept the changes that the governor’s recommending. Unless there’s been an emergency clause added to it, the bill would not become effective until July 1. There are some things that are considered to be emergencies and become effective as soon as the governor signs it but none of the bills we were tracking are emergency legislation.

[VIRGINIA]: Sounds like we had a pretty good legislative session this go around!

[COLLEEN]: It was a pretty good session. There is a lot of work to do in the coming year and I look forward to talking to you all about things we can be doing to prepare for the next legislative session.

[REN]: Well thank you again Colleen, we’ll be chatting with you pretty soon I think!

[COLLEEN]: Ok great thanks!

[REN]: And now, for a dLCV highlight:

[TERRY]: A parent called dLCV because her child, who is visually impaired, was not receiving the appropriate assistive technology in the classroom. The child could not participate in class because teachers were not modifying materials or using her assistive technology correctly dLCV worked with the family to ensure that the assistive technology was being used correctly, and we consulted with other agencies to ensure that the child’s vision needs were being met in the classroom. As a result of dLCV’s advocacy, this child is not just sitting in her classroom as she was before, but she is participating fully in her classes.

[REN]: So that was Colleen Miller, who was excellent as always!

[VIRGINIA]: I feel better about some things in the world, in the commonwealth we live in.

[REN]: Yeah we learned about a bunch of different stuff that’s really going to benefit people with disabilities. I’m really excited for some of that legislation to go through and to see how it improves lives. It's pretty cool stuff!

[VIRGINIA]: And make sure you guys are subscribed so you get part 2 which we will be putting out real soon.

[REN]: And thank you all for listening to this episode of Rights Here Rights Now, brought to you by the disAbility Law Center of Virginia. We’re available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, basically wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review!

[VIRGINIA]: If you need assistance, or want more information about dLCV and what we do, visit us online at dLCV.org.

[REN]: You can also follow us on Twitter @disAbilityLawVA and share us with your friends.

[VIRGINIA]: Until next time, I’m Virginia Pharis

[REN]: and I’m Ren Faszewski and this has been -

[REN AND VIRGINIA]: Rights Here Rights Now

End