The 1990s: Presumed Employability, Natural Supports, Careers and Self Employment.
During the late 1980s and through the 1990s, supported employment grew in importance.
The research showed supported employment was the most effective employment strategy for people with significant disabilities. Individuals who participate in supported employment generally have substantially greater earnings and more community interaction than their counterparts in sheltered workshops.
They report increased satisfaction from their work experience, and find it to be economically and socially rewarding.
Federal policy and funding continued to shift in favor of supported employment, at least as an option to be encouraged. The 1992 Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act made some significant changes:
- A shift to presuming the employability of most individuals with disabilities. State agencies would have to rebut that presumption to exclude someone from eligibility.
- Provided for choice of services and service providers.
- Emphasized careers, not just entry jobs.
- Included natural supports as an "extended service option" (thus rooting the concept in best practices or quality services).
By placing an emphasis on competitive outcomes for individual with disabilities, the 1992 Amendments went beyond the anti-discrimination focus of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. The Amendments promised increased use of Title I, section 110 General Funds for increased access to supported employment for people with more severe disabilities.
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Supported Employment Increases
By 1998, the number of people involved in supported employment increased from 9,800 to 140,000. A study of vocational rehabilitation outcomes for people with developmental disabilities found a number of important changes in outcomes between 1985 and 1998:
- No significant change in either the total number of people being closed or the number of successful closures for this particular population.
- A significant reduction in the number of closures into extended employment (sheltered workshops).
- The number of competitive labor market closures has increased, leading to the trend of a higher percentage of successful closures being into competitive employment. This demonstrates a greater emphasis on the use of competitive employment as a preferred outcome to extended employment.
- There has been an increase in the percent of total successful closures relying on supported employment, rising from 21.9% in 1991 to 37.5% in 1998.
- People in extended employment earned less than half the yearly earnings for a supported employment closure. Generally speaking, people in supported employment are earning below poverty-level wages.
- More in-depth analysis of who is receiving supported employment is needed in order to determine why their employment outcomes are significantly lower than those of people not receiving supported employment services. If, indeed there is more access to competitive employment for people who would have been served in extended employment settings, this is a positive trend. However, the challenge now is to find employment that will yield above-poverty level wages.
Photo courtesy Ann Marsden
1998 Income Levels
| Type of Closure | Yearly Income 1998 |
|---|---|
| Extended Employment | $2,747 |
| Supported Employment | $6,500 |
| Poverty Level for One-Person Household |
$8,050 |
| Non-Supported Employment | $10,064 |
| Federal Minimum Wage | $10,712 |
| National Yearly Income for General Population |
$29,319 |
(Gilmore, Schuster, and Butterworth, 2000)
The challenge of extending supported employment to more people with severe disabilities, however, remained a challenge. In 1991, the research outlined the nature of the problem. Supported employment programs served only a percentage of the population who could benefit from them. A national survey of day and employment programs found that individuals with severe developmental disabilities, cerebral palsy, and epilepsy accounted for less than 20% of all the people with disabilities receiving supported employment, work adjustment, and on-the-job training services from state VR agencies.
(Kiernan, McGaughey, Lynch, Schalock, & McNally, 1991).
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Differences in Outcomes
More recent studies found that individuals with more severe disabilities who do receive supported employment services do not have as positive an outcome as individuals with less severe disabilities.
They earn significantly less money, work fewer hours per week, and have fewer interactions at work than individuals with less significant disabilities receiving the same services. They are perceived as having lower work quality and fewer positive relationships with coworkers.
The greater number of hours of direct support received by these individuals also leads to less integration in the workplace and a less typical employment situation than their counterparts with less severe disabilities. Indeed, there seems to be a strong correlation between wages, level of integration, and typicality in job settings (Mank, Cioffi, and Yovanoff, 1998).
The promise of supported employment was great for people with severe disabilities. The delivery on that promise has been disappointing.
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"Although there has been growth in the number of supported employment provider agencies, the majority have added supported employment as a service option without decreasing funding, staff, or other resources to alternative segregated day services. Less than one fourth of provider agencies have shifted any resources and downsized alternative day services in order to offer supported employment. This finding confirms that the majority of provider agencies are filling available supported employment slots while maintaining segregated day services as the primary focus."
(West et al., 1992)
Photo courtesy Ann Marsden
Photo courtesy Ann Marsden
Photo courtesy Ann Marsden
Categories of Successful Closures
The 1990s ended with a court decision that would lay a much firmer base for realizing the promise of supported employment. The Olmstead decision related primarily to institutional versus community supports. It led, however, to far reaching actions in many arenas, including vocational services and employment. A monumental change would be the redefinition of what a successful closure is in the vocational services system. With that redefinition, the federal government ended its support of the dual system of sheltered and community employment.
Up until the end of the century, there were six different categories of successful closures in the vocational rehabilitation system. These were:
- Competitive labor market,
- Extended employment (formerly sheltered workshop),
- Self employed,
- Business enterprise program,
- Homemaker,
- Unpaid family worker.
Photo courtesy Ann Marsden
Typically, the vast majority of successful closures are in competitive employment (85% in FY1998). The second largest, however, were extended (or sheltered) employment closures. The Olmstead decision of 1999 and changes in the Rehabilitation Act eliminated extended employment (sheltered workshop placement) as a successful closure.
The 1992 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (P.L. 101-476) included transition services and assistive technology services as special education services. The 1997 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Amendments (P.L. 105-17) mandated transition services for children beginning at age 14 (instead of age 16).
There has been consistent and repeated attention to transition services over the decades since the President's Committee on Mental Retardation in the early 1960s.
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In 2003, in a paper for the Office of Disability Employment Policy, the National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability for Youth summarized the lack of progress throughout the 1990s, in spite of the attention given to the issue, in successful transition services for youth:
There continues to be a stubborn dilemma facing youth with disabilities. That is, in spite of supportive legislation and identified effective practices, these youth continue to experience high unemployment as well as insufficient opportunities to obtain competitive employment with the potential of career growth…
Certainly, some youth with disabilities have attained successful careers. Of these, some have benefited from well delivered special education transition services, while others have received timely and appropriately delivered youth employment services; many of these successes reflect both circumstances. Yet, these successes are not the norm.
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Consider the following:
- Special education students are more than twice as likely to drop out of high school as their peers in general education (Harris & Associates, 1998);
- Youth with disabilities are half as likely to participate in post secondary education as compared to their same aged peers without disabilities (National Council on Disability, 2000);
- Current special education students can expect to face much higher adult unemployment rates than their same aged peers without disabilities (Wagner, Cameto & Newman, 2003);
- The adjudication rate of youth with disabilities is four times higher than youth without disabilities (Quinn, Rutherford & Leone, 2001);
- The pregnancy rate for youth with disabilities is much higher than the norm – among females with learning disabilities, for example, 50% will be pregnant within three years of school exit (Shapland, 1999);
- Young adults with disabilities are three times more likely to live in poverty as adults than their peers without disabilities (Harris & Associates, 1998); and
- For those youth with significant disabilities the picture is even more grim: less than one out of 10 will attain integrated employment, five out of 10 will experience indefinitely long waits for post-school employment services, and most of these individuals will earn less than $2.40/hour in sheltered workshop settings (LaPlante, et al., 1996; General Accounting Office, 2001).
Photo courtesy Ann Marsden
Photo courtesy Ann Marsden
Photo courtesy Ann Marsden