In the years I worked for COFAR, I was never able to get the Globe or the media in general to understand that using a per-person cost figure at an institution like Fernald, without making an apples-to-apples comparison with costs elsewhere, is meaningless at best, and highly misleading at worst. Only the Globe’s editorial page has come close to understanding this.
In “The folly of closing Fernald,” the Globe editorial page acknowledged that cost comparisons involving Fernald are difficult to make because of the much more care-intensive population living in institutions than in the community.
But the issue goes beyond even that. As I’ve pointed out on COFAR’s website here and here, Fernald doesn’t exclusively serve the residents living there. Therefore, taking the facility’s entire budget and dividing it by the number of residents to arrive at a figure of $250,000 per resident doesn’t make sense.
Fernald’s budget includes the cost of the dental clinic, for instance, which serves community-based clients. It includes the cost of operating the Shriver Center on the campus, which does research that benefits people with mental retardation throughout the commonwealth. It includes the cost of the adaptive technology building, which benefits people in the community as well. The list goes on and on.
The families seeking to keep Fernald open are not asking to maintain the status quo. They are in favor of developing most of the 190-acre campus, while retaining a portion of the campus as a center for those who need its intensive residential and clinical services. This can be done just as cost-efficiently in the central location that Fernald now provides as would dispersing the residents to privately run group homes around the state, many of which would have to be constructed for that purpose.