Robert Latham, associate director of the University of Miami School of Law’s Children & Youth Law Clinic, recently presented preliminary findings to the National Council on Disability regarding Florida’s iBudget waiver program. The study, an interdisciplinary collaboration between legal and clinical experts, suggests that the administrative process for individuals seeking essential developmental disability support has become a systemically imbalanced and functionally inaccessible barrier for families. Latham co-researched the study with Cameron Riopelle, a sociologist and Director of Research Data & Open Scholarship and a Librarian Associate Professor at the University of Miami Libraries.
The research team analyzed 100 final orders from iBudget eligibility fair hearings and found that the problems described by advocates and families were not isolated anomalies. The results revealed a near-total denial rate, as only two out of the 100 applicants reviewed successfully reversed an eligibility denial. This lack of success is compounded by a significant legal imbalance; while the Agency for Persons with Disabilities was represented by counsel in every single case, only one petitioner in the entire sample had an attorney. Additionally, the process proved to be extraordinarily slow, with an average wait of 322 days between a hearing request and a final order, leaving families in crisis without services for nearly a year.
Latham’s presentation further criticized the state’s reliance on non-standard and outdated definitions of disabilities that diverge sharply from modern clinical practice. The study found that Florida’s eligibility criteria for autism appear to rely on the DSM-IV—a manual published over thirty years ago—rather than the current DSM-5.
In the clinic, Latham teaches students who handle cases involving abused, abandoned and neglected children in a variety of forums, including dependency and family courts, administrative hearings, and federal and appellate courts. Prior to joining Miami Law, he was a senior program attorney at the Guardian ad Litem Program.
