Goals

Prevent and respond to abuse, neglect, and legal rights violations in settings where people with disabilities live and receive services.

Priorities

1. Monitor facilities and community settings that serve people with disabilities to ensure they are free from abuse, neglect, exploitation, and disability rights violations.
2. Monitor Community Residential Care Facilities to ensure that people with mental health conditions are free from abuse, neglect, exploitation, and disability rights violations.
3. Ensure that people receiving Social Security and Supplemental Security Income are protected from abuse, neglect, or financial exploitation by representative payees through the Social Security Administration’s review process, referrals, education, and outreach.
4. Investigate events of serious injury to a person with a disability or any unexpected, unexplained death of a person with a disability in a facility or community settings, through referrals to licensing or oversight agencies, individual advocacy, and primary or secondary investigations.
5. Investigate allegations of abuse, neglect, or exploitation in Office of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (OIDD) facilities.
6. Continue legal work: DRSC v. Richland County– Monitoring of Richland County Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center (“ASGDC”) due to staffing shortages, unsafe buildings, frequent violence among detainees, and the lack of treatment and services for detainees with serious mental conditions.
7. Continue legal work: DRSC Cannon and Charleston County School District- Selected monitoring of Charleston County Juvenile Detention Center on conditions, policies, and practices that exist and have existed for the children detained there.
8. Continue legal work: DRSC, SC NAACP, Justice 360 v. Hendrick and SC DJJ– Monitoring of Department of Juvenile Justice facilities.
9. Investigate abuse and neglect claims of students with disabilities in the Horry County School District.

Goal 2

Ensure that people with disabilities can live and work in the community by accessing fair person-centered services, support, and resources to enforce their legal rights.

Priorities

Home and Community-Based Services

1. Provide self-advocacy assistance, limited assistance, and select direct representation to people with disabilities concerning denial, reduction, limited authorization, or termination of Medicaid services.
2. Provide self-advocacy assistance, limited assistance, and select direct representation to ensure that people with disabilities can receive services in their homes and communities.
3. Ensure that South Carolina develops an Olmstead plan, hires a Community Integration Director and a South Carolina ADA Coordinator, and creates an Advisory Committee comprising people with disabilities who receive community-based services and disability advocates.

Employment

1. Ensure that applicants and consumers of Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) services are informed of services and benefits available and their right to these services.
2. Address barriers to work for Social Security (SSI and SSDI) beneficiaries.
3. Investigate employment services for people on Home and Community-Based Service Waivers
4. Provide self-advocacy assistance, limited assistance, and select direct representation to people with disabilities concerning employment discrimination.

Education

1. Provide information, referral, and self-advocacy assistance to students and their families regarding educational rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Voting

1. Assist voters with disabilities in using their right to vote through a disability voter hotline, education, outreach, and collaboration with other voter advocacy organizations.
2. Educate state and local policymakers about the barriers to voting that people with disabilities experience and advocate for the removal of those barriers.

Assistive Technology

1. Provide information and referral, self-advocacy assistance, limited assistance, and select direct representation to access assistive technology.

Public Accommodations

1. Provide information and referrals, self-advocacy assistance, limited assistance, and select direct representation to people with disabilities about their rights to reasonable accommodation.

Goal 3

People with disabilities become better self-advocates through education and training

Priorities

1. Increase public awareness of DRSC services and resources through training and outreach activities.
2. Create more plain language resource materials in a variety of formats.