SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — Spurwink Services announced Wednesday it will close its Roosevelt School, which houses a 27-year-old South Portland program for young children with developmental disorders, and consolidate its services in Portland.
The nonprofit is planning an interior renovation of its Portland Cummings School to include a wing for younger children, organization officials stated.
“The landscape of providing culturally sensitive academic and therapeutic services to
children and adolescents who have significant emotional, behavioral and developmental
disabilities has changed, prompting us to take a proactive approach to ensure that safe,
structured and nurturing environments are provided to those we serve,” Dawn
Stiles, president of Spurwink, said in a statement Wednesday.
This is very sad. I worked for Spurwink as a painter and saw the mission and importance of the work this organization does. I also saw waste that would make you sick. Very good intentioned people collecting paychecks but not getting the job done and not wanting someone to push them out of their jobs for the greater good of the program. When I began painting my supervisor seemed like a good person but he had no idea what he was doing, no inclination to find ways to save money which would then help the school with its mission. It was very sad. I am a pretty proggresive guy, a bleeding heart conservative. What I saw was faux liberals collecting checks and cheering on causes without ever looking at ways to make things better for the school. It was all about them. I sure hope it has gotten better, I sure hope that those type of people mature and start caring less about their interest and more about the schools.
I now work for state government in California. I see the same attitudes here, it’s government work, it’s left leaning and there are few people willing to put the mission of our department over their own lives.
I hope things get better for Spurwink, we aren’t talking about selling used cars, we are talking about peoples lives.
You are right on the money (pun intended). I have worked in various social service arenas and usually the administrative people collect fat salaries and spend their time trying to justify their own jobs. Most of their energy is spent putting pressure on the “front line” workers to maximize contact with clients and generate as much billing as possible. They may have gotten into it for the right reasons but that gets lost along the way. I have seen lots of waste and acts of pure self-preservation in multiple agency settings. For that reason, I don’t work in the field any longer. I am not sure what needs to happen to create change, but it is a heartbreaking situation.
Ditto for HEADSTART programs…min. wage for teachers, big bucks for consultants, etc.
It seems as the need increases, help for disabled kids decreases.
I would like the Paper to ask for clarification as to what changes in the “landscape” specifically have caused this need for consolidation? Is it lack of funding (goes back to my waste comment), is it changing medicine? A transition to new theraputic methods? What the heck is Ms. Stiles trying to say? It’s very nice how she says it, like a shrink but it doesn’t tell me or the tax payers of Maine what kind of help they need. Perhaps a Bain Capital type treatment of how their facilities are run. If the mission is helping people every buck counts and when you aren’t even negotiating pricing for material tax payers are funding giant corporations who see a soft group of bleeding hearts coming.