By Victor Greto
When Rita Mariani was 12 years old and walked the neat, residential streets of Brookdale Farms in Wilmington, she had a secret.
Two secrets, really, which eventually guided both her heart and career.
She quietly ached when Mike on the red bike – a young man (from Highland West, north of Brookdale) who in 1970 was both seriously and teasingly labeled retarded but, in current parlance, is called intellectually disabled – stoically took the bitter taunts from Rita’s friends and neighbors as he rode through their neighborhood and tried to make friends.
“I felt impacted by the look on that young man’s face,” Rita Landgraf, 53, says now in the spacious office that pulses at the center of Delaware’s department of health and social services, where she oversees a $1 billion budget. “I committed myself to never do that to anyone with a disability.”
If that’s a lot to claim for a 12-year-old, it at least points to the sweep of Landgraf’s career path, which has taken her from running the Delaware chapters of The ARC and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, to co-chairing a governor-appointed commission to clean up the state psychiatric hospital – to now running Delaware’s department of health and social services, where she has been forced to make painful budget cuts during an economic recession.
“It’s the first time in many years that I’ve seen a person I work with in social services who is open to new ideas and input,” says Rep. Michael Barbieri, chair of the state’s health and social services committee. “She’s forced to take something from one side and makes sure it’s covered in another way.”
****
Landgraf’s memory of Mike on the red bike still haunts her.
“I didn’t do it,” she says of her friends’ taunting. “But I didn’t stop it, either.”
Perhaps this is what happens when you mix a self-proclaimed “type-A” personality with a sensitivity forged from the fires of sexual abuse. But it’s a sensitivity that has served her spouse, clients, friends and working associates well.
“I found her passion and ethical approach attractive,” says her friend and co-worker, Kevin Ann Huckshorn, director of the division of substance abuse and mental health services in Landgraf’s department. Landgraf lured Huckshorn, who is also acting director of Delaware Psychiatric Center, from a national position in Washington DC.
“To be able to be in a position that can actually effect change in a state that’s small enough to see the change occur, I couldn’t turn it down,” says Huckshorn of her job.
Landgraf also has given her second husband, Kurt, another chance with his three children, from which he says he had been estranged because of the intensity of his career, until he married Rita in 2001.
“She has been an extraordinary partner,” says Kurt Landgraf, who had headed DuPont-Merck and now runs the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J. “She brought back my kids and recreated the family situation that we had kind of lost.”
Born the younger of two children, Rita attended St. John the Beloved elementary school.
Her memory of attending McKean high school includes an attempt at playing the clarinet. She played it so well that the bandleader suggested she become a baton-twirler.
She did, but when she figured on a career as high school ended in 1976, she thought of majoring in psychology at the University of Delaware – although her parents had other ideas.
“They wanted me to be a nurse,” she says, “but I faint at the sight of blood.” Rita’s aunt had been a nurse, but she says she always felt the tug of working with the disabled.
“I never wondered what I wanted to be,” Landgraf says. “I wasn’t conflicted. I was focused on people with disabilities.”
Although she entered UD focused on psychology – she wanted to understand how the mind worked, and was interested in behavior – “statistics was ugly,” so she abandoned that and earned her B.S. degree in 1980 in Community and Family Services.
It worked for her because she spent two of her college summers helping to care for an 8-year-old girl named Chrissy, who had a severe case of cerebral palsy and needed constant care.
This segued into a job as an advisor in the client assistant program with United Cerebral Palsy, where she helped clients with various types of disabilities – blind, deaf and cognitive – deal with conflicts they had with the government bureaucracy and job training.
“I was the mediator between them and the system,” Landgraf says, and recalls being amazed how bureaucratic tension impacted each of her client’s lives.
She learned how the system worked, how to negotiate and, perhaps most importantly, how to speak on another’s behalf and resolve conflicts.
After four years, she left her “comfort zone” for a purely bureaucratic job, as a campaign associate for United Way of Delaware. This helped her learn how to run campaigns to raise money.
With that background, she got the job she seemed destined to do, at The Arc of Delaware, a non-profit that works to help people with cognitive/intellectual disabilities, first as assistant director for three years; then, after a brief stint as executive direct at the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Delaware (NAMI), she directed The Arc for a dozen more years.
It was her work at these organizations that propelled Landgraf to think more about support systems for the disabled, integrating them into their communities instead of cordoning them off into institutions or even apartment complexes.
“The idea is inclusion,” she says. “Society benefits from diversity.”
****
During the 1990s, Landgraf’s personal life took a few hits: she married in 1992, had a child, Lauren, two years later, but divorced after barely four years of marriage.
“I’m a survivor of abuse and I wanted to be normal,” she says of her desire to marry while coming to grips with being a victim of sexual abuse as a child.
She had been in therapy during this time, and “I thought marriage would make me normal,” she says. “But you don’t make life-altering decisions when you’re working things like this out.”
Yet, like her experience with Mike on the red bike, this part of Landgraf’s life informs everything else.
“It helped me believe in a recovery-based mode of care,” she says, “and gave me coping skills.”
Her work at NAMI also convinced her that helping those with severe mental illness was not beyond her skills.
She met Kurt Landgraf while directing The Arc; one of Kurt’s sons, Chris, is intellectually disabled, and now lives with the couple, who married in September 2001.
“Rita really changed his entire outlook on life,” Kurt says of his wife’s influence on his son. “Rita’s view of people with cognitive disabilities is that they have value and things to offer. The deal with them is they don’t want to be pitied or taken care of, but be treated with respect and dignity, and that was what my son needed.”
When she married, Landgraf left The Arc, and soon co-chaired the Governor’s commission on community-based alternatives for persons with disabilities, working with then-secretary Vincent Meconi at the state department of health and social services to promote the availability of community supports and services for persons with disabilities.
But she got everyone in the state’s attention when she was appointed by Gov. Minner to the Continued Improvement at the Delaware Psychiatric Center task force, where she met Huckshorn, who wrote the report with Landgraf.
“It was an unhealthy environment at the DPC,” Landgraf says, the state hospital that consistently had problems with the way its patients were treated.
Huckshorn says it was a lot of work to negotiate with the Department of Justice to get the state in compliance with the Olmstead Act, which, when appropriate, requires states to place qualified individuals with mental disabilities in the community and not in institutions.
“We got full 3-year accreditation, and were praised for active, individualized treatment, reeducation, and the reduction of injuries to clients and staff,” Huckshorn says. “We have about 170 residents, down from 240 in the last couple of years. There used to be hundreds and hundreds there. And we are building up our service system to intervene quickly before they have to get hospitalized.”
Of the 170 remaining, the state is working to place 80 reintegrated into the community.
It was Landgraf’s work reforming the hospital that got her Gov. Jack Markell’s attention. The new governor, elected in 2008, asked her to head the state’s department of health and social services.
Landgraf calls a chunk of her work at the department “triage,” staunching the flow of a hemorrhaging budget while maintaining 12 divisions and prioritizing programs.
She had to eliminate the General Assistance program, which gave 3,700 people – who are on Medicaid and a third of whom are homeless – $95 each month to help pay their bills, saving the state $3.5 million.
Landgraf got the Food Bank to help those who had been on General Assistance. “That’s where my experience in negotiating helped,” she says.
“She’s limited by the economy and the budget,” says Brian Posey, associate state director of advocacy for the AARP, which Landgraf led as president for nearly three years before working for the state. “It’s my hope and my goal for her to be secretary with budget surpluses and do the things she wants to do – home and community-based care for individuals. People want to be in their own place, not in a facility, but our system is behind the curve in getting that done.”
Landgraf says she wants to look at the department holistically.
“I want to transform the system this way, promoting self-sufficiency, which is part of our mission,” she says. “We’re at a crossroads with government services and I believe that whenever you’re at a crossroads it gives us a great opportunity to make reforms to enhance society and individual lives. We shouldn’t waste this moment.”