(Georgia Recorder)— Workers who assist Georgians with disabilities are starting to see a long-awaited pay bump, giving providers hope that they can finally compete again with the fast food and retail jobs that have been eroding their workforce and hamstringing their capacity to function.
The pay increase is the result of a wage study two years ago that led to a recommended $6-per-hour increase for workers called direct support professionals. Previously, they were, on average, making $10.63 an hour at a time when fast food chains and big box retailers were offering higher pay.
That lagging wage has contributed to a workforce crisis that providers say intensified after the pandemic, causing providers to close facilities and scale back services. That workforce shortage continues today, often leaving people with disabilities and their loved ones scrambling to find caregivers.
That’s why increasing the wage for these workers has been a priority issue for advocates who are often at the state Capitol pushing for more funding for Medicaid services meant to keep people with disabilities out of an institutional setting, often referred to as a waiver service.
D’Arcy Robb, executive director of the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities, which advocates on behalf of people with disabilities, called the pay increase “critically important.”
“It’s really critical in just stopping the financial bleeding,” Robb said.
But getting the funds to service providers is slow-going. This year, the governor and state lawmakers set aside the funding for the $107 million pay increase, and the federal government approved the rate increase on July 1, kicking off a monthslong implementation process that is still ongoing.
Providers were able to start using the higher rate in mid-October.
“Implementing the rate increases is a complex process that requires significant time and effort to ensure accuracy and efficiency,” said Camille Taylor, communications director for the state Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities. “The Department was able to complete these changes and implement the new process in just 3.5 months – in the past these updates have taken more than a year to implement.”
The state also owes providers funding for the wage bump going back to July when the changes became effective. That funding will continue to arrive in phases.
The staggered schedule was designed in coordination with the state’s providers to cause them the least amount of disruption, Taylor said.
A faster payout would have required a three-week pause in billing, which providers told the state would “create significant financial challenges” for them, Taylor said. The process is set to wrap up in February.
‘We couldn’t even compete with fast food’
Ryan Whitmire, who is the president of the state’s provider association, said he hopes the increase will help turn around the industry’s workforce woes.
“What the governor and the General Assembly did last session was historic in the sense that they truly made an investment to get things back in balance that had been out of balance for over a decade,” Whitmire said.
“And that leap forward was really just to get it back in balance, to have direct support staff be able to compete with the fast-food industry. That’s not where we want to end, but we were so far out of balance that we couldn’t even compete with fast food,” he said.
Whitmire said each provider is handling the pay increase differently, including the timing. But his organization, Developmental Disabilities Ministries, was able to start paying the higher rate last month and plans to give workers a special Christmas bonus and an “end of year blessings bonus.”
The bonuses are possible because the organization has received almost half of the back pay owed to them.
“We really appreciate our employees that have really hung on and stayed at a job that they could have gone anywhere else and been paid more money, but they’re doing it because they love the people that they serve,” Whitmire said.
“They’re not just doing it for a paycheck, but it’s going to greatly help, I believe, recruit new staff, as well as to pay people not what they’re worth because I think they actually deserve to be paid more than the average of $16.70. But it is a giant leap forward from where we were,” he said.
Whitmire said he thinks the next six months or so will show whether the new wages are close to where it needs to be. Last year, advocates had pushed for the rate to be closer to about $19 per hour.
If the increase falls short, providers will not have to wait as long for the state to at least take another look. Under a measure passed in 2022, the state is now required to review the reimbursement rates for home- and community-based services every four years.
Some lingering concern
Under the new plan, facility-based group providers who offer what is often known as day services are not eligible for the higher pay rate. They were also pushed toward a smaller staff-to-individual ratio, going from 10-to-1 down to 8-to-1.
Robb, with the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities, praised these changes. She said the recent changes “incentivize best practices over some frankly outdated practices.”
“What the new rates do is they actually incentivize providers to have people out in the community,” she said. “That’s what you want for anybody, is to be out and in the community and not spending their lives in a facility, not spending decades in adult daycare.”
But Robb said she is hearing grumblings about the changes, and she said she is worried providers will try to pressure state officials to retreat from the changes.
“Yes, we need more money for disability services in this state, but we also want to make sure that money is spent on quality services,” Robb said.
Whitmire, the president of Service Providers Association for Developmental Disabilities, acknowledged that some providers have concerns. He said Wednesday the association is working with DBHDD officials to try to work out a solution.
He said during an earlier interview that providers are working to “advocate for choice.”
“SPADD’s position is that we truly believe that people have the right to choose services based on the model they want, and individual choices of the people served and their families are important,” Whitmire said.
