A Critical Examination of State Agency Investigations into ...

While reports indicated that the Anderson School made improvements in many of theseareas, ongoing issues continued to be found and documented.Only two weeks after it issued its Statement of Deficiencies regarding JonathanCarey, OMRDD made another visit to the Anderson School. On December 6-7, 2004,OMRDD Deputy Commissioner for Quality Assurance Abelseth, Chief Psychologist JillPettinger, and other OMRDD staff members conducted this monitoring site visit at theAnderson School. After the visit, Abelseth notified the Anderson School, in a letter datedDecember 10, 2004, of various deficiencies relating to behavior plans, use of plannedignore, and incident management. Although the letter noted incident management andinvestigation procedures had improved since OMRDD’s last visit, other areas of concernremained. With regard to one of the school’s residential programs, OMRDD noted thatone behavior plan sampled was “poorly written,” while another behavior plan lacked“adequate data collection methodologies as only target behavior data was collected.”Similar deficiencies were found by OMRDD with the agency’s educationalprogram. Problems with data collection were noted in the sample of behavior plans,which included Jonathan Carey’s plan:The data collection methods at the…School were deficient as they onlyinvolved collecting data on the target behaviors and did not provide a datacollection or tracking system to monitor progress with use of the identifiedreplacement behaviors.The December 10, 2004, letter also stated that there were “no monthly psychologynotes related to monitoring the progress of the consumers related to the goals/objectivesidentified in their Behavior Support Plans” and “no indication as to when the plans get148