Atlanta

Renewed effort to create an agency just for Georgia’s blind community

By WSBTV.com News Staff
By WSBTV.com News Staff

ATLANTA — A state senator from the metro area says she will renew her effort to create an agency just to assist Georgia’s blind community because the services currently provided are so poor. Those services are provided by the Georgia Vocational Rehabilitation Agency. In the 10 or so years that Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Richard Belcher has covered GVRA, poor service has been a regular complaint.

Over the past seven months, we’ve covered a series of other irregularities in the agency — including the widely reported and bizarre case of the agency’s communications director pleading guilty to criminal charges because she was caught faking pregnancies to get state benefits to which she was not entitled. But the fundamental problem has always been poor services for people with disabilities, about 250,000 of whom are blind or visually impaired.

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Cecily Nipper is glad the legislature will have another shot at creating a stand-alone agency for blind people.

“The first counselor that I encountered under GVRA knew very little about vision loss at all and knew very little about how to manage my case. I’m now on my third counselor with GVRA. They’ve lost my paperwork three times,” Nipper told Channel 2.

GVRA talks about its commitment to training blind persons. That’s visible in an old video we found on the internet. The agency’s former director discusses the good works performed by Georgia Industries for the Blind. The state has a quarter of a million blind or visually impaired residents, so it’s not a small issue. But listen to Cecily Nipper describe her experience since her vision got significantly worse last December.

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“I did apply for services and have spent eight months just going through the administrative side to try to get news of whether I’m approved for services or not, and I still don’t know,” she said.

“People in that agency really don’t understand what they (the blind) need,” says State Sen. Gail Davenport, a Democrat whose district covers parts of DeKalb, Henry and Clayton Counties. Her bill to take services for blind persons away from GVRA and give them to an agency just for blind people passed the state senate earlier this year but not the house. She promises to try again next year because she contends GVRA is failing blind people at a fundamental level.

“It takes a long time for people to respond to them, and when they respond, they just don’t get the services that they need,” she told Channel 2′s Richard Belcher. He followed up: “Is this a new complaint with GVRA, or has it been around for a while?” Said the senator: “It’s been around for a while.”

DJ McIntyre got involved with Georgia Council of the Blind because her mother has been blind since birth. “They make all these big promises, and they want to blame it on all of these things, a new director, finances, restructuring, but the baseline problem is: people who are blind or visually impaired are not being prepared to get jobs,” she told us.

Sen. Davenport recalls a GVRA official telling a legislative committee, “There is nothing wrong, and that they (GVRA) can provide the service.” We asked if she believes that. “No, I do not,” she said.

GVRA declined to provide anyone on camera to answer questions or even a statement for our story.

Channel 2 has filed a request under Georgia’s Open Records Act for GVRA’s responses to the federal agency that monitors GVRA. Federal funding pays for most of the services GVRA provides. We’re hoping those documents will shed some light on the state agency’s own appraisal of its work.

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