The TEAM Centers Inc. is a private nonprofit organization with an office at 1000 Third St. in Chattanooga that handles evaluation and assessment of people with developmental disabilities.When it comes to heartlessness and the cruel gutting of essential services for the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled, Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration and his chiefs at the state’s Department of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (DIDD) are apparently peerless.
First they slashed budgets and services in the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Then, overriding pleas from advocates from the Tennessee Health Care Coalition, they stripped TennCare’s meager capacity to provide back-up mental and behavioral-care services.
Then they eliminated a critical funding grant of $774,000 for the Chattanooga-based TEAM Evaluation Center, the lifeline for some 2,700 patients and their families in southeast Tennessee who need help to care for children and adult family members with autism and other intellectual and developmental disabilities.
And then, they told the families of patients at TEAM to look for help at the equally strapped county school systems and Siskin Hospital, neither of which possess the staff or the expertise in severe developmental disabilities that would be needed to replicate the coordinated teams of diagnosticians, clinicians and doctors at the TEAM Center.
The state’s myopic elimination of the sustaining grant to the TEAM Center, announced barely two weeks ago, was as surprising as it was shocking. It was surprising because it came with no advance notice, and only after the Legislature had ended its session and its budget reviews, which might have averted the shutdown had it been announced earlier.