Chirlie de Blasio's rebranded ThriveNYC office gets another 115 million dollars to waste

 

NY Post

The city budget deal struck Wednesday includes $115 million in added spending by the new city agency that grew out of first lady Chirlane McCray’s controversial, $1.25 billion mental-health initiative.

The boost gives the Office of Community Mental Health — which Mayor Bill de Blasio created last month to make permanent and also rebrand the former ThriveNYC program — a total of nearly $320 million in taxpayer money under the spending plan for fiscal 2022.

The additional allocation of taxpayer money includes $96 million for a citywide expansion of the multi-agency Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division — known as “B-HEARD” — which dispatches teams of EMTs and social workers in response to 911 calls about non-violent, emotionally disturbed people.

The program, which was launched in parts of Harlem earlier this year, is intended to reduce the number of confrontations between cops and mentally ill people, although B-Heard teams can still summon the NYPD if situations spiral out of control.

The First Lady Co-Mayor doesn't care about mentally ill people

 

 

 NY Post

 A Brooklyn nurse says he repeatedly tried to warn city First Lady Chirlane McCray about the devastating effect of reassigning psych wards to be used for COVID-19 patients — only to be ignored by her billion-dollar mental-health initiative.

Irving Campbell, a psychiatric nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist, told The Post he watched his 50-bed ward close in March to treat people with COVID-19 — leaving at least some of the hospital’s former mental patients on the street, rooting around in the trash nearby.

“My intention of reaching out was to get the support of the mayor and first lady in keeping these inpatient psychiatric beds available to the community,’’ Campbell wrote in an e-mail to a counselor with McCray’s embattled $1.25 billion mental-health group ThriveNYC in late July.

The counselor blew him off.

“I am unable to provide you with a way that you can speak directly with the Mayor or Ms. McCray,” the counselor wrote — although she suggested Campbell “continue to speak out about a need you see in your community,” according to a copy of their exchange.

Campbell then tried to reach ThriveNYC on social media and sent a letter to the mayor but got no response.

New York has lost 400 psych beds to coronavirus patients in private hospitals statewide since the pandemic broke out.

About 100 of those beds were in New York City. They included the 50 spaces at Campbell’s hospital, as well as 34 at Presbyterian’s Allen Pavilion in Upper Manhattan and 20 at Northwell Health’s Syosset Hospital on Long Island.

Campbell, who is active with the New York State Nurses Association, said that while state hospitalizations for the virus have plummeted, his unit has yet to reopen — and his union suspects this is because the hospital’s mental-health patients were largely poor, and other health-care issues generate as much as 70 times their related payments.

NYC's First Lady is a tax boondoggle.

Impunity City

Mayor de Blasio is in quite a pickle. He hasn’t been able to get aid from the state and because congress couldn’t agree to a goddamn stimulus, the Blaz can’t get federal funding despite all his pathetic begging and pleading and probably compounded by his asinine decision to paint Black Lives Matter in front of the President’s luxury tower. So the city’s budget ax is going to come down on a lot of administration departments and city services.

Except for one…

Flushing middle school children are contemplating thoughts of suicide

NY Post

Kids aren’t talking about soccer or English class in the halls of JHS 189 in Flushing.

They’re talking about killing themselves.

Sixty students have expressed suicidal thoughts in the past year, Principal Magdalen Radovich told a recent gathering of nearly two dozen elected officials and community leaders. The Department of Education claimed Radovich “misquoted” the figure but refused to give The Post any data.
None of the children made good on their threats, and parents were called in each case. But shocked local lawmakers are calling it a crisis.

“If 60 kids on the Upper East Side talked about suicide, Mayor de Blasio would be there interjecting himself,” Assemblyman Ron Kim fumed of Hizzoner, whose wife, Chirlane McCray, has made mental health her signature cause.

“Sixty … is a staggering number, but even one is too many,” said City Councilman Peter Koo, who attended the Feb. 7 legislative breakfast at the school along with Kim and Flushing Chamber of Commerce’s John Choe.

Just the mention of the 60 cases — about 8% of Daniel Carter Beard School’s roughly 740 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders — sucked the oxygen out of the room, the men said.

The movers and shakers had even been scheduled to tour the school but ran out of time because they peppered the principal with so many questions about the suicide talk.

 

“It is shocking to me that central DOE has not yet communicated this data with us,” Kim said. “How could DOE have dropped the ball in addressing these issues?”

Radovich brought up the figure after she asked for the group’s buy-in for a mental health and wellness center on campus.

“She was trying to make the point that she had never seen anything like this in her years of being an educator,” Kim said.

Kim also wants a deeper discussion of what is behind the scary talk. He and Choe, the Chamber’s executive director, contend the crisis doesn’t stem from peer pressure or group think, but from Flushing’s lack of affordable housing and skyrocketing commercial rents.

Chirlane McCray's ThriveNYC program shuns the homeless

NY Post


The head of first lady Chirlane McCray’s embattled mental health program, ThriveNYC, claimed that it doesn’t have an abnormally high staff turnover rate — even though the plan’s own data says it’s 40 percent.
“I don’t think our attrition rate or turnover rate is higher than most city agencies,” Thrive director Susan Herman said at a Bronx press conference Thursday announcing the program’s expansion into 13 city libraries.
The city tracks its employees using a “separation rate” that includes retirement as well as firings and departures. From 2008 through 2017, the average separation rate for NYC government staff hovered around 7 percent.
The Administration for Children’s Services, which struggles to keep employees in jobs handling cases of abused children, had a 10 percent turnover rate between 2014 and 2017.
The Post reported last week that the average time a staffer at the $1 billion ThriveNYC program stayed in their position since the program started in 2015 is just 10.5 months, despite generous average pay of $104,000, according to program data obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request.
A ThriveNYC spokeswoman pointed out that if new staff who were added when the program opened a dedicated office in January are not taken into account, the average tenure jumps to 18 months. That’s still nearly half as long as the average 36 months ACS workers stay in their jobs.
McCray and Herman were at the Bronx Library Center announcing a new initiative called “Spaces to Thrive” that will provide mental health workshops in libraries, a dedicated bookshelf on the subject, and a public information campaign.
But the $45,000-a-year Spaces to Thrive initiative won’t include any outreach to the homeless who often seek shelter in public libraries.

 Yeah, I know this story is about Chirlie's overpaid aides doing narrative control about the scandalous Thrive program but the last line here deserves more attention.

Council Member Holden gets blown off inquiring officials about Thrive program's ineffectiveness

NY Post


A Queens lawmaker accused the head of first lady Chirlane McCray’s embattled “ThriveNYC” mental health initiative of refusing to explain why the city ignored so many warning signs surrounding the vagrant who bludgeoned four homeless men to death in Chinatown last weekend – because she has no answers.

Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens) initially called out ThriveNYC Director Susan Herman and other city officials during a council hearing Tuesday. He was asking them how Randy Santos, 24, went under the city’s radar despite having a history of unprovoked violence – including a November arrest for allegedly biting a man on the chest.

“There were certainly a number of red flags over the years,” Holden said. “There was a trail of violence all involving random people.”

“These signs were here with this individual for years, and he was in and out of the system,” added Holden. “This is again happening all over the city – random attacks. Does this kind of thing red flag your agencies at all to say ‘we should step in’?”

Neither Herman nor Myla Harrison, assistant commissioner for the Department of Health, directly answered his questions during the hearing on mental health services for immigrants.

Instead, they tried to shift focus by insisting most homeless New Yorkers don’t suffer from mental illness and that they’re limited from discussing Santos’ treatment history.

“We were all horrified by what happened, and we are all looking at it, and we will learn from this incident, “ Herman said. “[But] I think you are aware of the fact that we can’t talk about specific services this particular individual accessed [by law].”

Holden tried to ask follow-up questions but was cut off by Councilman Carlos Menchaca (D-Brooklyn), chairman of the immigration committee, who claimed he wanted to give other legislators the chance ask questions.

Holden left the hearing fuming and later accused Herman of “dodging” his questions, adding McCray’s $250 million Thrive initiative “lacks a real plan to deal” with emotionally disturbed persons like Santos.

“[Herman] could have said, ‘I can’t speak about this case, but hypothetically we do this when this happens,’” Holden said. “But she didn’t want to because she couldn’t — and that’s the whole thing.”
“They are not helping the seriously mentally ill,” he added. “The city is not doing its job with all the money they are putting towards ThriveNYC.”

But let's focus on a few citizens saying inappropriate things about homeless people and not on what officials who are supposed to help them are not saying and are blatantly avoiding addressing the issue.

Chirlane McCray's mental health program is a billion dollar flop

NY Post


The $560 million in taxpayer money spent on First Lady Chirlane McCray’s ThriveNYC program hasn’t adequately addressed the need for mental-health services in the city — which actually “worsened” over the past year, The Post has learned.

The bombshell finding by the city Health Department was revealed in a draft report that was reviewed last week during a meeting of the department’s advisory Community Service Board.

“We are seeing consistently high demand for high needs services including rates of suicide,” the report says.

“We need to engage in a process with state partners to expand our portfolio of services and better address the needs of New Yorkers.”

Despite McCray’s claims of transparency regarding her embattled mental-health program, City Hall refused to release a copy of the Health Department report.

But a source provided The Post with details, including the report’s conclusion that during the past year, “Mental health service needs have worsened, as have substance use disorder needs, and developmentally disabled needs.”

The report blames the situation for a long-term increase in emergency room visits by mentally ill people who face “barriers to appropriate and relevant community care.”

ThriveNYC has spent $2 million on a program called NYC Safe, which is supposed to pair cops with health-care workers to help steer homeless and mentally ill people into treatment so they don’t wind up in the hospital.

But the program has only aided 1,000 people over the past 2¹/₂ years, according to figures released in March.