Columnist: Texas fights ‘a symptom of sick system’
March 11th, 2009Rick Casey, writing in the Houston Chronicle, says Texas contributed to problems in state institutions by setting the wages for direct care workers at subsistence levels. Casey’s column comes in the wake of allegations that staffers at the Corpus Christi State School entertained themselves by staging unwilling fights between residents with intellectual disabilities.
Beginning workers in the system are paid $1,711 a month, Casey says, up to a maximum of $1,970. During the most recent fiscal year, more than a third of the staff was terminated. An excerpt:
… it’s hard enough, as Wall Street has demonstrated, to build a culture of excellence and virtue when you’re paying people well. It’s impossible on starvation wages.
… These are uncomfortable facts.
They mean that while any staffers who staged such fights abused people in their charge, the rest of us neglected them.
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