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Iowa's new human services director offers optimism for GRC's future

Opinion-Tribune - 7/12/2017

The new director of the Iowa Department of Human Services (DHS) said Thursday the Glenwood Resource Center (GRC) is providing "essential" services to individuals with severe intellectual disabilities that aren't available from private providers and he's optimistic about the future for the state-managed facility.

"One of the appropriate roles for government is providing services for people that face different challenges that nobody else is able to provide," Jerry Foxhoven said during an interview with The Opinion-Tribune. "Clearly, the people that we're serving here in Glenwood are people that for the most part don't have a place in the private sector they can go to. They need help, they need the services we can give them. There isn't an alternative for them, so I think it's a very appropriate role for the state to be here and I also think it's an essential role."

Foxhoven, who has a strong background in child advocacy and juvenile law, was appointed DHS director in June by Gov. Kim Reynolds, replacing longtime director Charles Palmer, who retired in May. Foxhoven toured the GRC campus Thursday.

"This is my first time visiting here," Foxhoven said. "I'm familiar with it because of some of the bad press recently associated with it and I've been doing my research preparing for this job. I've also been familiar with it for years because of my advocacy roles outside of DHS."

Foxhoven said he sees a strong future for the GRC, despite the downsizing that's taken place on the campus over the past several decades and a growing national push to move people with intellectual disabilities away from institutionalized settings into community-based treatment programs.

"There's some people that I think even the people here would say, 'We'd like to transition them out to a community-based setting,' but there isn't some place that would take them," Foxhoven said. "I think that will always be the case, frankly.

"It's hard for me to envision that there wouldn't always be a need for us. In a perfect world, there would be so many private providers out there that want to provide services to people with unique challenges that we wouldn't need state institutions. That's a perfect world that none of us really envision happening."

Foxhoven said he expects a new GRC administrator to be named in the coming weeks and he's confident the right steps have been taken to address isolated and highly-publicized cases of abuse and mistreatment of residents last year by a handful of former GRC employees.

"We have great people here. We had a situation where there were some people here that shouldn't have been here. There's no question about it, but they are not indicative of the rest of the people who work here," Foxhoven said. "We have tremendous people here that care about the people we serve and do a wonderful job of serving them.

"It's kind of like any place in the world - there can be a couple of people that everybody judges the whole organization or the whole industry by."

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