10-20-09 Update – Laid Off by the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities

At 11:00 a.m. today I was informed that I will be laid off. The good news (sarcasm) just never ends.

In the spring of 2008 a new Institute was formed at UNC-Chapel Hill, where I work. The Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities was supposed to be a benign, over-arching organization to coordinate educational and outreach activities of the four entities that were put under its control. One of those entities was Division TEACCH, the autism program for which I have worked for the last five years. Each entity was assured that they would maintain their organizational autonomy. The new CIDD was not here to interrupt their operations, but to enhance their mission.

In February 2009 my immediate supervisor, the deputy director of TEACCH, was summarily fired by the CIDD, without the approval of our director. We were all shocked. They came in and promised us that our director still had control over our organization—control over its money and control over its personnel. They promised us that any future dismissals would be done by our director, not by them, and that they did not anticipate any.

But despite these promises, in the intervening months they have taken over control of our finances. At this point, our director is not being given any information about our budget. He is in the dark. They have been taking over control of personnel decisions piece by piece, bit by bit, for a long time, too. So much for organizational autonomy.

On June 30th I was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer and began missing a lot of work. I made no secret of my medical condition. It is common knowledge.

At some point after this, the CIDD officials decided to eliminate my position “due to the budget.” (Eliminating it for any other reason, such as absenteeism due to illness, would be illegal, after all.) It takes some time to get the paperwork approved through the University-level HR, so I have no exact idea how long this dismissal has been in the works, but I know that action was taken to make my position expendable only after I had begun missing a good deal of work because of my illness. (Six other positions were also eliminated at the same time today.)

TEACCH has always been fiercely loyal to its employees, and it has tended to breed that same kind of fierce loyalty in return. When employees get sick with cancer, die from cancer, or have severely debilitating strokes, TEACCH does not get rid of them. TEACCH hangs in there with them. TEACCH protects its own.

The “benign” CIDD appears to operate under a very different set of standards. Standards different than the ones it professed when it was originally set up, standards different than the ones that were promised to all of us in open meetings throughout the spring of 2009, and standards different than the ones that have made TEACCH the internationally acclaimed program it is today.

My last day of work will be November 20th. I haven’t decided yet whether it is something to be thankful for, or no