Release Date: 23 April 2002 Contacts: Cathy Skivers (510) 357-7877
` Jim Willows (925) 846-6086
CALIFORNIA’S UNEMPLOYED BLIND NEED ONE POLICY,
-- NOT 17 --
BLIND ADVOCATES URGE
PASSAGE OF SB105
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
American
Foundation for the Blind – West, San Francisco Braille
Institute of America, Los Angeles California
Council of the Blind, Statewide Center
for the Partially Sighted, Los Angeles Foundation
for the Junior Blind, Los Angeles Lions
Blind Center, Oakland Living
Skills Center, San Pablo Peninsula
Center for the Blind, Palo Alto National
Federation of the Blind of California Rose
Resnick Lighthouse for the Blind & Visually Impaired, San Francisco Sensory
Access Foundation, Palo Alto Society
for the Blind, Sacramento
At least 100,000
working-age Californians are blind and unemployed.
BARC
A coalition has emerged charging that much of that unnecessary unemployment is due to a splintered and piecemeal structure in the state Department of Rehabilitation.
The Blind Alliance for Rehabilitation Change (BARC), a statewide campaign of blind Californians in consumer and nonprofit organizations today urged Governor Davis to streamline California’s unwieldy service delivery system for blind consumers into a single effective division by signing SB105.
“Today a blind job-seeker in one part of California may get excellent support from the local Rehabilitation counselor while another job-seeker 100 miles away may face local district policies that are slow to respond to a blind client’s needs,” said Jim Willows, immediate past president of the National Federation of the Blind of California. “Currently the policies are fractured into 17 districts where administrators have unprecedented – and widely varying – interpretations of how to serve their blind clients,” Willows said, “In one part of the state, blind clients are immediately issued equipment necessary
for training or school, while in another, bureaucrats unfamiliar with the special technical needs of the blind often delay such purchases, for months, a demoralizing and unnecessary practice.” Willows went on to explain that the 17 districts vary widely in how many hours of training they sponsor for blind job-seekers needing critical skills such as computer training, and instruction in Braille and cane travel.
The result: California’s rehabilitation counselors with blind clients have average rates of job placement far behind the national average. In a recent study conducted by Mississippi State University, California’s State Department of Rehabilitation was 48th in job placement closures, ranking it among the lowest in the nation.
BARC insists the wildly varying speed and completeness of blindness services in California’s 17 districts is not necessarily because of poor administration, but rather a result of a one-size-fits-all and unresponsive Rehabilitation agency which has not specialized its structure to best serve California’s blind job-seekers. While the majority of other states expedite such training and purchases through small, dedicated commissions or divisions for the blind, California persists in its decades-old policy of lumping blind services into a half-billion-dollar unspecialized Rehabilitation administrative structure. The result is in most cases, blind jobseekers’ counselors are supervised by layers of administration, each of which is without specialization in blindness.
BARC points out, furthermore, that none of California Rehabilitation’s existing 17 District Administrators are themselves blind, yet all ultimate decision authority on blind cases now rests on these 17 non-specialist administrators.
BARC’s members charge that California’s current practice of lumping blind employment services under the jurisdiction of 17 administrators who must spend 98 percent of their time on other issues makes effective specialization impossible. It’s no accident, then, that 26 states have chosen to follow a different model WHICH IMPLEMENTS provisions in the US Rehabilitation Act ALLOWING states to use federal funding to provide for separate blindness services outside of a single generalist structure.
BARC hopes to bring these improvements to California through passage of SB 105 sponsored by Senator John Burton (D-San Francisco). Burton’s bill would establish, for the first time, a special division of services for the blind and provides for a tight, unified administration of all blindness services through specialist counselors, supervisors under a single Deputy Director, ensuring an upgrade in the quality of services available to California’s estimated 500,000 blind and visually-impaired citizens. Through savings in administration and otherwise, the new Division for the Blind would cost approximately the same amount as the current unfocused system, yet be much more effective in both service delivery and job placement. All California blindness groups support the bill.
“Any time you employ people who know the special needs and capabilities of the blind you’ll get better results than sending us to bureaucrats who don’t have the experience of knowing what we need to succeed,” said Cathy Skivers, President of the California Council of the Blind. Skivers explained that her organization hears directly from anguished consumers every week whose training is delayed or whose adaptive equipment needs are questioned by generalist Rehabilitation employees lacking in knowledge of the needs of a blind caseload. “This Administration says it believes in self-determination and empowerment of its disabled citizens. Well, the blind of California are unanimous in believing that services provided by passage of SB105 will establish a structure that will work far better than what we have today,” Skivers concluded.
Without modifying its decades-old structure, blind Californians are likely to continue seeing an erosion of their fragile economic status. In fact, in the 12 years since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, California’s Department of Rehabilitation has actually become less productive in finding competitive employment for its blind clients than it used to be. At best, each year the old philosophy of one-supervisor-serves-all is now placing only a few hundred blind people into employment each year. Blindness consumers and agencies believe that a continued low rate of placing blind people in jobs will increase, not decrease its already unacceptably high unemployment rate.
“It’s an embarrassment,” said BARC’s Willows, “Here we live in the state and century of high tech and yet California has been passed up by most other states in placing blind people into competitive employment. Blindness professionals from all over the US are watching California to see whether we’ll bring our blind services into the 21st century. Both past and current US Rehabilitation Services Commissioners, in fact, support a specialized division or commission approach enthusiastically.”
Indeed, with unemployment among working-age blind Californians running at 70-plus percent, even a modest increase in blind employment would save government between $10,000 and $20,000 per year per person. Bringing California Rehabilitation’s lagging placement rates in line with a state like Texas would result, then, in a net savings of millions of dollars to the taxpayer.
BARC coalition members – both blind and sighted -- have begun a bold initiative to travel throughout the state during the remainder of the legislative session in a public awareness initiative. Any legislative or other public group is warmly encouraged to contact BARC’s leaders, listed above, for speakers and literature. SB105 successfully passed through the state Senate in March and will be heard in the Assembly beginning in late April.
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The Blind
Alliance for Rehabilitation Change (BARC) is the largest and most unanimous
group of blind consumers, professionals and organizations ever assembled in
California. BARC’S members, with
facilities and services for blind people in nearly every area of California,
have joined forces since 1998 to seek to correct the poor tract record of job
placement of blind and visually impaired people by the California State
Department of Rehabilitation. BARC’s
member organizations annually serve
more than 60,000 people who are blind or visually impaired and are supported by
a constituency of over 500,000 citizens.
Members of BARC include consumer organizations, non-profit agency
service agencies, and citizens throughout California.