Trapped and Seeking Independence

If you haven't had a chance to read any of the Minnesota Star Tribune's A Matter of Dignity 5-part series, you should check it out. It's interactive and extremely well done. Reinforces why Personal Outcome Measures and Person-Centered Thinking is so critical for our field. This was part 1.

In a field on the outskirts of town, a man with Down syndrome is spending another day picking up garbage.

He wears faded pants, heavy gloves, a bright yellow vest and a name tag that says “Scott Rhude.”

His job is futile. Prairie winds blow debris from a landfill nearby faster than he and his co-workers can collect it. In the gray sky overhead, a turkey vulture circles in wide loops.

Rhude, 33, earns $2 an hour. He longs for more rewarding work — maybe at Best Buy, he says, or a library. But that would require personalized training, a job counselor and other services that aren’t available.

“He is stuck, stuck, stuck,” said his mother, Mary Rhude. “Every day that he works at the landfill is a day that he goes backward.”

Rhude is one of thousands of Minnesotans with disabilities who are employed by facilities known as sheltered workshops. They stuff envelopes, package candy or scrub toilets for just scraps of pay, with little hope of building better, more dignified lives.

Many states, inspired by a new civil rights movement to integrate the disabled into mainstream life, are shuttering places like this. Not Minnesota. It still subsidizes nearly 300 sheltered workshops and is now among the most segregated states in the nation for working people with intellectual disabilities.