Disabled Oklahomans wait and wait for help

"I remember thinking I was losing it. I cried my eyes out," Felty said, recalling a blur of loving but sleep-deprived care of her child Kayla White.

Felty was one of thousands of parents or guardians of disabled children who have been on the state's waiting list for years. Those on the list need help ranging from after-school child-sitting to job training to a monthly case of diapers to additional therapy.

She felt overwhelmed, forgotten and was languishing on a list that never seemed to change. Then someone with the state — she can't remember who — reached out to her.

Felty had waited about five years. She got one of the state's first emergency in-home support waivers, providing a few hours' after-school help.

But more than 5,700 other disabled Oklahomans are waiting for help. And they've all been waiting for years.

The next person likely to get help has been waiting on that first-come, first-served list since April 26, 2004.

There's just not enough state money to pay for all the needs of those on the list, said James Nicholson, the state director of the Department of Human Service's developmental disabilities services. More than $50 million in state money has been budgeted this fiscal year for the programs designed to help people who were once on the waiting list.

"You can only serve as many people as you have dollars to serve," he said.

"I think that, obviously, the magic bullet ... would be a tremendous economic turnaround."

The list was started in 1993 with requests for people ages 3 to 70 years old. Each year, another 1,000 or so people apply to get on the list as word spreads of its existence.

"I don't expect we will ever get help from the program. The list is not moving," said Stacy Bauter, the divorced mother of 13-year-old Jacob Gaches, born without part of his brain and with fluid on the brain.

Jacob has extensive medical problems, autism, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and a developmental delay that prevents him from getting dressed on his own or caring for himself. When he was little, he had a shunt placed with a tube to relieve the fluid on his brain. Years later, he had to spend a summer in a body cast after surgery to realign his hips.