Three developmentally disabled adults living at Fircrest School in Shoreline filed, through their guardians, a civil lawsuit in King County Superior Court Dec. 18 against the state seeking a permanent injunction to keep the school open. Joining them in the suit is Friends of Fircrest, a non-profit organization of guardians and friends, and the state employees union.

The lawsuit accuses the state Department of Social and Health Services of seeking to evict Fircrest residents “without the informed consent of the guardian, without any therapeutic basis for the relocation and for no reason other than budgetary considerations, and without adequate hearing rights afforded to these vulnerable citizens.”

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Michael Parsons, 60, Randolph Getchman, 50, and Gladys Barker, 77, three profoundly retarded Fircrest residents.

This past summer the state Legislature approved a 2003-2005 budget that requires the downsizing of Fircrest and directed DSHS to close two cottages at the facility by March 2004. Two more cottages must be closed by the end of the biennium.

A state Legislative audit report released in Oct. 2002 found that the state’s five institutions for the developmentally disabled are underutilized. Over the past 30 years, populations at the institutions have declined from 4,145 in 1967 to about 1,200 today, and at Fircrest from 1,000 to 255. In the face of a $2.6 billion deficit, state lawmakers this past summer moved to consolidate some of the state’s institutions for the developmentally disabled. Lawmakers passed a biennial budget that downsizes Fircrest over the next two years and moves all the residents to the state’s other four institutions or into community living situations. Fircrest needs about $25 million in capital improvements. Closing and selling the facility could translate into approximately $32.7 million in savings or revenue to the state.

But the lawsuit argues that the state manipulated the population numbers by freezing admissions to the RHCs in 1988. It cites a Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services audit which found that DSHS was in violation of federal law by failing to provide information that the institutional living option was available to the developmentally disabled.

The lawsuit also argues that Fircrest is “permanently established” under state law and that the most vulnerable of the state’s residents live there.

Moving the residents to community-based housing or into one of the state’s other institutions is “forcible eviction and relocation” of approximately 69 Fircrest residents without “informed consent of the guardian, without any therapeutic basis for the relocation, and for no reason other than budgetary considerations, with inadequate hearing rights.”

A 1999 U.S. Supreme Court decision requires states to place persons with mental and developmental disabilities in the least restrictive setting that is possible and appropriate. The lawsuit argues that Fircrest School is the most therapeutically appropriate and least restrictive alternative. The union argues downsizing or closing Fircrest, causing their work to be done by others, is a breach of contract.