Disabled team

In order to comply with the letter of the law, the prosecutor's office ordered the eviction of sick children from the boarding home

An acute socio-political conflict flared up in Kamchatka. The Kamchatka Regional Prosecutor's Office sent a protest to Governor Mikhail Mashkovtsev with a demand to eliminate a series of violations in the field of protecting the rights of people with disabilities. The governor considers the position of law enforcement agencies mocking.

As senior assistant prosecutor for public relations Anastasia Sachenko reported, during a routine inspection of social institutions in a boarding home for children suffering from psychoneurological diseases in the village of Yagodny, violations of Russian legislation were revealed. In particular, the guardians of the law found that although the institution is designed for 100 people, 119 patients are being treated there. The main violation that Kamchatka prosecutors saw is that although the institution is officially considered a children's institution, 14 of the students are already over 18 years old. Consequently, according to the former regional prosecutor Sergei Bazhutov (Nizhny Novgorod recently became his new place of work), their further stay in a children's institution is impossible. At the time of the inspection, one of the residents of the disabled home was 24 years old.

Governor Mashkovtsev called this approach on the part of the prosecutor’s office “formally correct, but essentially a mockery.” The head of the Kamchatka administration called on the guardians of the law to correlate their decisions with life. There are no free places in the only psychoneurological boarding house for adults in Kamchatka. Moreover, there are about 250 patients on the waiting list to get a job there. There are also no funds to send sick people to the mainland, and this is hardly correct from a moral and ethical point of view. After all, most of the patients at the Yagodninsky boarding school on the peninsula have parents and relatives. Mikhail Mashkovtsev stated that he is not going to comply with the prosecutor’s protest and has already written off the corresponding decision. It is still unknown whether the recently appointed regional prosecutor Anatoly Knyazev will seek to enforce his predecessor’s decision through the court.

The director of the boarding school, Natalya Khomenko, is sure that representatives of the law are simply forcing her to put 14 of her pupils on the street. Although not a single patient who has even reached the age of majority is adapted to life outside the boarding school. The diagnoses of the children raised here are too serious. There are no funds allocated for the construction of a new boarding school. Moreover, after a powerful earthquake occurred in Koryakia, the staff of the psychoneurological center for adults had to carry out another compaction.

The head of the department of social protection of the population of the administration of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Mikhail Puchkovsky, who has already become famous for the scandalous introduction of bread cards in August of this year, took his own initiative to solve the problem of lack of places in Kamchatka boarding schools. As Mr. Puchkovsky stated, the main reason for the overcrowding of centers for mentally retarded people is the extremely low level of social payments to parents or guardians of sick children. If a mother raising a child with Down syndrome receives about 3,500 rubles. per month, then the state spends about 20 thousand rubles on maintenance in a specialized boarding school. per patient. If at least half of this amount were used to pay disability pensions, then, according to Mikhail Puchkovsky, the severity of the problem of seriously ill people could be alleviated quite quickly.

Ilya SERGEEV, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky