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.

One Year Later, a Return to Rhode Island

A year ago, Rhode Island agreed to find better opportunities for at least 2,000 people with developmental and learning disabilities. It was part of a settlement after a federal investigation uncovered programs that funneled people with disabilities into sweat shops, where they toiled for very little pay.

One year later, journalist Casey Nilsson looks at what progress the state is making to address the problem.

As NYS Phases Out Workshops, Agencies Seeking Alternatives for Individuals

Sheltered workshops, once considered a progressive alternative to institutionalizing the developmentally disabled, could soon be artifacts of a different era and philosophy. 

Gerard McEneaney, 56, at his
sheltered workshop.

New York State ended new admissions to sheltered workshops as of July 1, 2013, and will stop funding for them in 2020 -- the result of the state's April 2013 agreement with the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

Fighting for Sheltered Workshops

It's a hectic day at Production Unlimited in Watertown, N.Y. Everyone has to drop his regular work — making plastic binders, safety equipment, office supplies — for a huge order.

Beth Carpenter punches hole after hole into colored plastic tags. She and her co-workers are paid based on how fast they work, usually well below minimum wage. Carpenter has done all different kinds of tasks here for more than 15 years.

"And I like working here every day," she says. "I work here five days a week. That's why I'd like to make sure we fight to keep this place open."

It's no secret that New York state is phasing out sheltered workshops like this one. 

Justice Dept.: Segregation in R.I. Programs Violates Civil Rights

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Thousands of Rhode Islanders with disabilities are “unnecessarily segregated” in state-licensed day programs and so-called sheltered workshops — some for decades — in violation of federal civil rights laws, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation has found.

N.J. Saves Sheltered Workshops

defendingThe state’s sheltered workshop program will continue after participants and their families rallied the Legislature to keep it in place as an option for adults with disabilities to do meaningful paid jobs in safe and supportive workplaces despite their challenges.
Earlier this year, the New Jersey Department of Human Services’ Division of Developmental Disabilities announced plans to begin phasing out and defunding sheltered workshops, including a program at the nonprofit Burlington County Occupational Training Center in Burlington Township, in favor of reformed and expanded supportive work programs that would focus on moving the population into competitive employment in the community.

Workers at the Occupational Training
Center in Burlington Township.

The reform was in keeping with New Jersey’s commitment as an “Employment First” state that recognizes that “competitive employment in the general workforce is the first and preferred post-education outcome for people with any type of disability.” While providers, including the OTC, applaud the shift in focus and would still deliver the services, they argued that the state shouldn’t eliminate all other options.

Future of Sheltered Workshops Debated

Patrick Biscoe, a worker at the
sheltered workshop, sorts through
old x-rays that will be recycled.

ELWYN, Del. -- Nobody working in the sheltered workshop at Elwyn Delaware gets a cut in pay if their Paratransit bus is an hour late. Nobody raises an eyebrow if they wear a helmet to work or answer questions by pressing a button on an electronic voice device.
The passageways are wide enough on floor A and floor B for anyone in a power wheelchair to move easily. And those who walk without difficulty can scoot quickly between work tables to distribute supplies needed to keep the work line on schedule.
Some of the 154 employees at Elwyn have worked at its tables for 30 years. They are among about 500 Delaware residents with intellectual and physical disabilities who work in such jobs with state and federal support.

Promoting Jobs vs. Workshops in Ohio

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- If he had been born 50 years ago, Ian Baustian might have been institutionalized. Locked away.
No one would have discovered whether he was capable of more.
Back then, Baustian wouldn't have been a laboratory clinical assistant at Fairfield Medical Center in Lancaster, where he works alongside people who don't have disabilities - people who embrace him and his autism.
His kind of story is both triumph and tragedy, as far as advocates are concerned. As far as Ohio has come in employing developmentally disabled adults, the state has much further to go, they say.