Russell Home faces closure
State: Center needs to be licensed facility or face fines of up to $1,000 a day
For 67 years, the Russell Home for Atypical Children has cared for Central Florida’s most vulnerable individuals — people who may not see, hear, walk, read, speak or otherwise fend for themselves.
By most accounts, it has done an exceptional job. The home does not charge anyone and doesn’t accept any government funding.
But now, state officials have warned that the home needs to become a licensed facility — or shut down. If it doesn’t, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration wrote in its most recent letter to the Russell Home, it will face a cease-and-desist order and fines of up to $1,000 a day.
“We’re baffled,” says executive director Vantrease Blair, whose grandmother, Vantrease Russell, started taking special-needs children into her family home in 1949. “I know there are bad people in this world who would take advantage of others, but we’re not trying to do that. We’re just trying to do what my grandmother did her whole entire life.”
The state began investigating the home last October following an anonymous complaint that it
was operating without a license, says AHCA spokeswoman Mallory McManus. Negotiations with the home since then haven’t resolved the state’s main point of contention: “By law the facility would need a license to continue operations,” McManus says.
The problem, it seems, is in the limits a license might impose. There isn’t a category that the home neatly fits into: It no longer qualifies as a child-care facility as it once did — the children taken in by “Grandma” Russell, who died in 2003, are now adults. And if it operates as an assisted living facility, it would have to reject the more recent clients who are younger than 18. If it is licensed as a group home, it’s limited to 15 residents; the Russell Home has 25.
“We don’t want to turn anyone away,” Blair says. “And choosing who can stay and who has to go? That’s like telling me which sisters and brothers I can keep.”
Late Friday afternoon, the Russell Home’s board of directors voted to file the group home application to avoid a cease-and-desist order
but requested that the AHCA sign an agreement promising not to move any of the current residents. It was not immediately clear how state officials will respond.
A registered nonprofit organization, the Russell Home has earned a large and loyal following over the years. Last week, a supporter launched a Change.org
petition asking state officials to make a licensing exception for the home, and the group’s Facebook page has filled with messages from outraged fans of the charity.
But Blair says she doesn’t object to licensing on its face. In fact, the Russell Home has had licenses under various state agencies in the past, though state
officials sometimes struggled to define the home. A 2006 letter from the Florida Agency for Persons with Disabilities, for instance, states the home’s “size, nature and structure … precludes APD licensure” under any of its categories.
The home doesn’t charge the residents who live there full time — some of whom are now middle-age and have no other family. Nor does it charge the handful of clients who come for day care, or those whose families simply need a reprieve of a week or two from round-the-clock care-giving.
Instead, it raises $93,000 a month through donations and its thrift shop to cover licensed certified nursing assistants, cooks, custodians and administration costs. In addition, the home spent the past eight years raising $1.8 million to triple its cramped facility and upgrade everything to modern building codes. That construction is due to be finished this fall.
“To have all this come up now…” Blair says, her voice trailing off.
As she speaks, the women in the home are taking a dance class, and the sound of laughter and chatter spills into Blair’s office. A nurse in the front room cradles a 12-year-old boy who was born without most of his brain. Other residents and day clients are in class or playing games.
“They interact like that all day,” says Kathie Post, a Winter Garden resident whose 37-year-old daughter attends day care there while Post works. “If my daughter were in some state-run facility, she’d be sitting in a chair all day. I can’t say enough about the place.”
Jeannie Flynt of Orlando started bringing her son, Matthew, there in 2009. Born with a chromosomal disorder, he is now 29 and has severe intellectual and physical limitations. But Flynt was so impressed by his progress that, in 2013, she quit her corporate management position to become a teacher there.
“Before I found the Russell Home, some of the places I checked out I wouldn’t take my dog to,” she says. “But you can come here any time, just drop in, and you will see the people like Matthew laughing, having fun, having a life that matters. To me, the Russell Home should be a model.”
The charity still hopes to resolve the matter amicably, says Tampa attorney Robert Williams, a senior litigator who has volunteered his services for the cause.
“I’m prepared to go to court if it becomes necessary,” he says. “But we’re trying to avoid that.”