AT ADVOCATE
Newsletter of the National Assistive Technology Advocacy Project
A Project of Neighborhood Legal Services, Inc.
295 Main Street, Ste. 495 · Buffalo, New York 14203 · (716) 847-0650
(716) 847-0227 FAX · (716) 847-1322 TDD · e-mail: atproject@nls.org · Web Page: http://www.nls.org
Funded  through a grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research,
U.S. Department of Education, under contract number H224B990002. The opinions expressed do not
necessarily reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Education, and no official endorsement by the
U.S. Department of Education of the opinions expressed herein should be inferred.

    Since May 1996, Neighborhood Legal Services, Inc. (NLS) has operated a National Assistive Technology (AT) Advocacy Project. With a subcontract from the national United Cerebral Palsy Associations (UCPA) expiring on September 30, 1999, we applied to become designated as the national AT technical assistance provider to Protection and Advocacy (P&A) programs. Effective October 1, 1999, the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) within the U.S. Department of Education awarded NLS a three-year grant, allowing us to continue as the National AT Advocacy Project.

    Under this new grant, our in-house resources will be somewhat diminished in Year 1 and further diminished during Years 2 and 3. However, new efficiencies created by expanded use of technology, combined with new partnerships with the National Association of Protection and Advocacy Systems (NAPAS) and UCPA, should allow us to continue and even expand overall resources to support the work of Protection and Advocacy for Assistive Technology (PAAT) programs.

    This newsletter will summarize the core services of our Project that will continue, and explain our new partnerships with NAPAS and UCPA and the new initiatives we will undertake with them. We will also explain several of the new projects we have planned for the first year of the new grant.

A NEW GRANT, NEW PARTNERSHIPS, AND NEW MANDATES

    The AT Act of 1998 replaced the Technology Related Assistance to Individuals with Disabilities Act (“Tech Act”). Pursuant to the AT Act, in July the Secretary of Education announced new funding priorities for AT technical assistance (TA) activities and announced requests for proposals to provide AT-related TA under four separate priority areas. NLS applied under Priority 2 and was awarded a three-year grant to serve the P&As.

    Our continuing and new activities are described below. This grant establishes a new, direct relationship with NIDRR and the U.S. Department of Education. NAPAS and UCPA will partner with us under separate subcontracts. NAPAS will provide management related training and TA to P&As, helping us meet a new mandate for service delivery. Both NAPAS and UCPA will work with us to plan and deliver distinct distance learning initiatives related to special education and AT.

    At the time NIDRR announced our new grant, it also announced that grants had been awarded under the AT Act’s three other priority areas:

Priority 1, Technical Assistance to State AT Act Projects: Awarded to the Rehabilitation Engineering Society of North America (RESNA). RESNA, with offices in Virginia, had received funding to provide similar services under the former Tech Act.

Priority 3, AT Act Data Collection Project: Awarded to InfoUse, with offices in California. This project will collect data from the State AT Act Projects and the PAAT projects “that can provide policy-relevant information to Federal, State, and local decision makers about the availability, use and reliability of AT devices and services and exemplary practices to improving access to AT services and devices.” 64 Fed. Register 37365 (July 9, 1999).

Priority 4, National AT Internet Site: Awarded to Georgia Tech University. The Internet site will be established “for the purpose of providing to individuals with disabilities and the general public TA and information that will increase access to AT devices, AT services, and other disability-related resources.” Id.

    NIDRR is requiring that each of the four TA providers actively collaborate with the other three to ensure that each provider, and the customers it serves, obtain the combined benefits of the other providers. To that end, we will periodically meet, via teleconference, to determine how best to effectuate this collaboration.

    We are also expected, under this new grant, to structure our services to encourage the entire P&A in each state to be involved in the delivery of AT-related services. This has always been a goal, but must be even more so with many P&As having diminished funding for their PAATs.

    This will continue to be available through telephone, letter, fax, or email. We will strongly promote use of email to increase efficiency and enable the caller to receive an expanded range of documents as email attachments. Callers are encouraged to present questions concerning the criteria governing a wide range of AT funding sources, and concerning how to best pursue cases through both administrative appeals and litigation.

    We will continue to maintain an Administrative documents Library and a Court-Related Documents Library. We will continue to rely on you to send us materials to include in the libraries.

    We recently updated and upgraded our AT Resource Digest, a series of abstracts allowing the user to quickly identify hearing decisions and other administrative documents on a wide range of issues. Now, the word-searchable digest is on our web site and can be searched without the necessity of downloading the directory or software as required in the past. Persons visiting our web site will also be able to print abstracts which was not possible with our earlier system which offered a “read only” capacity. The user can then request hearing decisions by referencing the identification number from the abstract. For example, in searching under the terms “Medicare communication device,” the user is lead to the Matter of William R., a 1997 Medicare decision from Idaho in which funding is approved for a Canon Communicator augmentative communication device. The identification number from the abstract, NLS No. 0346, can be used to request a copy of the decision.

    We will continue to collect a wide range of documents in a court documents library. Recently, we updated our court docket, an alphabetical listing of the current 100 court cases from which we have collected more than 400 documents. After some clean up of the written docket, it will be sent to P&As and will also be posted on our web site. Between now and April 2000, we will develop a subject matter index and also make that available to P&As. It will allow P&A staff to quickly identify court decisions, briefs, and pleadings, limiting the need for original research.

3. Materials Preparation and Dissemination:

    Key contributions have been our newsletters, several longer articles, and our Funding of AT booklet series. These publications have allowed P&A staff to access up-to-date written information concerning AT funding sources and their legal criteria, limiting the need for original research. We will continue to distribute existing materials and will regularly produce new material in each of the three categories. [A summary of the publications available or to be available appears on page 174-175.]

    Our biggest contribution has been a multi-day national conference, which has received rave reviews and drawn an average of more than 70 attendees during each of the past three years. The next Bridges to Better Advocacy conference is already scheduled for Austin, Texas, April 6-8, 2000. We also expect to provide two or more sessions each year at the annual NAPAS conference, with this year’s conference scheduled to take place in Washingtoin, D.C. on June 21-24, 2000. In the past, we also tried to accommodate P&A requests to speak at statewide or regional AT-related training events. As our resources will drop off more substantially in Years 2 and 3, we expect to limit the number of commitments for statewide and regional training events. As an alternative, we will seek to get more mileage out of our resources by partnering with our subcontractors on the developoment and delivery of distance learning initiatives.

    This is a key service of our Project, allowing the P&As and others to access many of our written resource materials, at any time of the day or night. Our web site has also allowed P&As to access other web-based resources, using a well-developed set of links.

    One of the keys to our delivery of high quality, cost-effective technical assistance, training, and support services will be to make maximum use of web-based services. To that end, we will work closely with our Advisory Board, our partners, NAPAS and UCPA, and all of you to constantly assess how we can better use our web site and other web-based strategies to deliver services. We also plan to work with the other AT Act TA providers to determine how to best serve our combined customers through our collective web-based resources.

    To date, this has been accomplished primarily through issue-specific work groups, newsletters, postings on our website, and group fax alerts. Although we are charged with providing technical assistance on a wide range of legal issues and impacting on a wide range of funding sources, often an attorney or advocate from another state may have a depth of experience on the particular issue you are confronting. The work groups on Medicaid and Medicare have provided a good forum for identifying advocates from other states who may be able to provide that valuable input. The limitation of these groups is that they meet in alternating months, with each group meeting no more than four times per year.

    To meet the shortcomings of the work groups and other methods of communication with the rest of the PAAT network, we will very soon establish a “list serve.” As described below, the list serve will allow any P&A attorney or advocate, who has email capacity, to regularly post questions, requests for information, or announcements to be instantaneously delivered to all other persons who are subscribers to the list serve.

NEW INITIATIVES

    A new service required to be delivered by our National AT Advocacy Project is management-related technical assistance and training, services that have not been part of our scope of work in the past. Rather than develop a whole new area of expertise and diminish our advocacy-related resources, we have subcontracted with NAPAS to meet this need. As most of our readers know, NAPAS has been in the business of providing these services to P&A managers and fiscal officers for many years and will now extend those services to issues related to P&A grants under the AT Act.

    Training sessions for P&A managers and fiscal officers, on PAAT grant-related issues, will occur in conjunction with each of NAPAS’s four regularly scheduled national training events, including: its Winter Conference, generally held in January, providing skills building training to middle managers; its CEO/New Directors Conference, generally held in the early spring, designed to meet the needs of Chief Managers of the P&As; its Annual Conference, generally held in May or June; and its Fiscal Management Conference, generally held in the summer, with training focusing on the fiscal requirements of federally funded programs.

    P&A staff seeking technical assistance on contract-related issues related to their PAAT projects can call Elaine Mbionwu, the new Director of Management Services at NAPAS. Elaine can be reached by phone at 202-408-9514 or by email at elaine@napas.org.

    The list serve has become a popular way of using email to communicate among a group of people in distant locations who share a common interest. The list serve works best if its number of participants is not unduly large and the range of common issues within the group is not unduly large either. Based on discussions with a number of our readers and within our Advisory Board meetings, we plan to develop the list serve as a tool to provide better communication within the network of P&A attorneys and advocates who work on AT issues. We plan to have the list serve operational by the end of the year.

    Here is the way the list serve could work. Tim Sindelar, an AT attorney with the Disability Law Center in Massachusetts, is settling a lawsuit involving Medicaid funding of AT in nursing homes. As part of the settlement, he is in a position to offer language that would go into his state’s regulations or policy governing approval of AT in nursing homes. Tim would like to find out if other states have good regulatory or policy language that could be replicated in his state (this is a real concern that Tim has presented to us). He posts this as an inquiry on the list serve and it goes out as an email message to the 113 persons from 45 states or territories who have enrolled with the list serve (it will not cost you anything). Three people respond that their state has good language and agree to fax copies of regulations to Tim. Three others share ideas of what needs to be in the regulations. Two others tell Tim they are very interested in seeing what he gets, as they face the same problem in their states. All other members of the list serve get to read this email exchange, or at least peruse the substance of the messages. Hopefully, Tim gains some valuable information with very little investment of his own time. [By the way, if you have information that you think can help Tim, you can reach him at 617-723-8455 (voice), 617-723-9125 (fax), or tsindelar@aol.com (email).]

    The list serve will also be a valuable forum for us at the National AT Advocacy Project, or for any of you, to post valuable information on court decisions, new legislation, or anything that may be of interest to our network. You will soon receive a request for updated information for our PAAT directory, including a request for email addresses and a solicitation to become a part of the list serve. We do hope you will consider joining us on this one.

    As part of our subcontract with NAPAS, during 1999-2000 we will partner with them to design and deliver a five-part distance learning series (by teleconference) on Funding of AT through the Special Education System. Ron Hager of our Project and Diane Smith of NAPAS will be the key people involved with planning and delivery of this series. Our time table is to deliver this in the late spring 2000. During years 2 and 3 of our grant, materials will be improved and updated, and the series delivered again. We will also work with NAPAS to identify other AT-related topics for distance learning initiatives during Years 2 and 3. Since we plan to promote more involvement from the entire P&A in AT-related advocacy, our marketing of this series will go well beyond the PAATs.

    Through our subcontract with UCPA we will partner, during the next year, to develop a four-part distance learning curriculum on Funding of AT Through the Special Education System designed for consumers, families, and professionals. The purpose is to provide P&As with all the tools they will need to deliver this as a distance learning initiative in their respective states. This will be a full-package distance learning curriculum that can be readily delivered by any PAAT program. The package provided to P&As will include everything they need to organize, publicize, and deliver a four-part series on Funding of AT Through Special Education Programs. In collaboration with UCPA, we will produce: a detailed curriculum, with agendas for each of four, 90-minute teleconference sessions; consumer-friendly handouts to accompany each of the four sessions; and an evaluation form to be completed by those attending each session. We will also provide a step-by-step guide for organizing, publicizing, and accepting registrations for the series. During Year 2 of our grant (i.e., 2000-2001), we will also collaborate with UCPA to re-package this curriculum for presentation as an Internet-based distance learning series.

    We look forward to working with you during the next three years and do hope you will be able to join with us and others on the many upcoming activities. Together we can make a real difference.

DO YOU HAVE EMAIL?

    With our new grant comes a new schedule for AT Advocate. Our last newsletter before this was our June-July 1999 issue. With the hectic schedule of closing out our old subcontract and preparing for this new grant, we did not publish an August/September 1999 newsletter. Our next newsletter will be our December 1999/January 2000 issue.

• Funding Assistive Technology for Persons with Disabilities: The Availability of Assistive Technology Through Medicaid, Public School Special Education Programs, and State Vocational Rehabilitation Agencies, 31 CLEARINGHOUSE REV. 50 (May-June 1997).
  
• PASS: Supplemental Security Income’s Plan for Achieving Self Support, 30 CLEARINGHOUSE REV. 1101 (Mar.-Apr. 1997).
  
• Supplemental Security Income and the Family Law Attorney: Using Creative Alimony, Child Support, and Property Settlements to Maximize Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid, and Create Funding for Assistive Technology, 33 CLEARINGHOUSE REV. 148 (July-Aug. 1999)

• Medicare and AAC Devices: Funding Augmentative and Alternative Communication Devices Through Medicare - The Decision Making and Appeals Process for Non-HMO Participants, 19 pages (April 1999)
  
• Medicare, AAC Devices and Managed Care: Funding Augmentative and Alternative Communication Devices Through Medicare - The Decision Making and Appeals Process for HMO Participants (available late 1999, or early 2000)
  
• Funding of Assistive Technology - The Public School’s Special Education System as a Funding Source: The Cutting Edge, 49 pages (June 1999)
  
• Funding of Assistive Technology: State Vocational Rehabilitation Agencies and Their Obligation to Maximize Employment, 28 pages (July 1999)
  

• SSI and the Family Law Attorney: Using Creative Alimony, Child Support, and Property Settlements to Maximize Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid, and Create Funding for Assistive Technology, 25 pages (November 1999)

• Funding of Assistive Technology: Using the Social Security and SSI Work Incentives to Fund AT (awaiting final action on Work Incentives Improvement Act; target publication date, early December 1999)

• Funding of Assistive Technology: Using the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Fair Housing Act to Fund AT (target publication date, spring 2000)

    SAVE THE DATE! Our fourth annual conference for AT advocates will take place on April 6-8, 2000 at the Hyatt Regency in Austin, Texas. Pre-conference sessions on Medicaid and special education for newer advocates will take place on Thursday, April 6^th. The primary conference will take place on Friday and Saturday, April 7^th and 8^th.

The AT Advocacy Project will provide nationwide services to PAAT projects including technical assistance to advocates wanting to access funding for assistive technology for individuals with disabilities.

Update on The National Assistive Technology Resource Library

    We have designed a word-searchable digest, using computer technology, to store and retrieve hearing decisions and other administrative documents. We also have indexed more than 400 documents from more than 100 pending and decided court cases. All documents are available through our AT Resource Library. Please send us your hearing decisions, briefs and other documents involving AT.

Please send information to:                               TEL: (716) 847-0650
Attn.: Diane Dustin                                             FAX: (716) 847-0227                  e-mail: atproject@nls.org
Neighborhood Legal Services, Inc.                   TDD: (716) 847-1322
Ellicott Square Building                                      Web Page: www.nls.org
295 Main Street, Rm 495
Buffalo, NY 14203

NLS Home Page| Feedback