From: "Kelly Pierce" (kelly@RIPCO.COM)
Sent: January 29, 2001 7:33 PM
Subject: Blind Californians Seek Commission For Blind
This story is significant as California is America's largest state and the two national blindness groups are working cooperatively on a solution from which all can benefit. The piece of information that stood out in the article was the comparison between California and Texas. A blind person in Texas is seven times more likely to get a job than a blind person in California.
Kelly
Sacramento Bee
Special agency for blind sought: Advocacy groups fault Rehabilitation Department
By Melanie Payne
Bee Staff Writer
(Published Jan. 28, 2001)
It was a historic moment.
One night early this year over wine and Chinese food, members of the National Federation of the Blind of California and the members of the California Council of the Blind set aside some 30 years of bickering to come together for a cause. They, along with other advocacy groups for the blind, have formed the Blindness Alliance for Rehabilitation Change.
The alliance is going up against what they say is a multimillion dollar bureaucracy -- the Department of Rehabilitation.
The alliance says the best way to serve the state's estimated 600,000 blind and visually impaired people is to stop lumping them in with other disabled people. Instead they recommend establishing a Commission for the Blind, an agency specifically designed to meet the needs of the blind.
Alliance members say that about 70 percent of working age blind people are out of work despite the booming economy and the estimated $25 million a year that the Department of Rehabilitation spends on services for the blind.
California's unemployment rate now hovers about 3.2 percent.
The Department of Rehabilitation's mission is to assist those with all types of disabilities in gaining employment and becoming independent.
Critics say, that because the department isn't focused on the needs of the blind, it doesn't adequately help the blind.
The 38-year-old department "clearly isn't established for blind people," said Nancy Burns, president of the National Federation of the Blind of California and former counselor for the Department of Rehabilitation.
"There are special needs and training that a blind person needs to be independent," Burns said. But the department doesn't understand that, she said, and it isn't giving people the skills they need to be able to work.
Erin Treadwell, a department spokeswoman, said the department had no position on the commission and declined to comment on it.
The department's director, Catherine Campesi, who moved into the position last year, was unavailable to comment because of a busy schedule, Treadwell said.
Treadwell did, however, elaborate on the changes under way at the Department of Rehabilitation to address some of the blind community's concerns.
In the last six months, Treadwell said, the department hired a new deputy director of specialized service who will oversee services to the blind and deaf.
It is also reinstituting a requirement that counselors for the blind and deaf exhibit additional competency in order to serve blind and deaf clients.
The department, which has been understaffed, has launched a nationwide search for qualified rehabilitation counselors, Treadwell added.
Critics contend, however, that this is too little, too late.
Nationwide, an estimated 70 percent of blind people of working age are without jobs, a figure that has remained unchanged despite record low unemployment levels for the sighted population, according to statistics from the National Foundation for the Blind.
In fiscal 1999-2000, the Department of Rehabilitation placed in jobs roughly 323 people who were blind or visually impaired, including 19 who were self-employed. Ten people in the Sacramento district got jobs with the assistance of the Department of Rehabilitation.
Bryan Bashin, executive director for the Society for the Blind in Sacramento, is harshly critical of the job the Department of Rehabilitation is doing to help the blind find jobs.
"California really lags behind," Bashin said. "If you live in Texas and you're blind, you have seven times the chance of getting a job than if you live in California."
Bashin recognizes that the department has begun to change.
Still, he said, the system needs "a fundamental, structural rebuilding."
The unemployment rate for the blind and what activists see as the failure of the department to adequately address the situation has galvanized support for a separate Commission for the Blind.
The Department of Rehabilitation has "six layers of bureaucracy" between the rehabilitation counselor and the director, said Gil Johnson, director of the National Employment Program for the American Foundation for the Blind.
By its own admission, the Department of Rehabilitation is spending an estimated $25 million annually on services for the blind. It successfully meets the rehabilitation goals for 1,240 of the roughly 4,900 clients who use its services each year. Of those 1,240, about 300 are placed in jobs.
The department's total budget is $444 million. It spends about $316 million on vocational rehabilitation.
According to Johnson, the department has 70 rehabilitation counselors that work with blind clients. Half of those counselors provide job services, the others work with clients on independent living skills.
That means an average of four to five blind people were placed in employment by each of the department's 70 counselors last year,
Johnson said. The national average, he said, is 15.
In addition the average salary of a person placed in a job through the Department of Rehabilitation is $350 a week.
Oregon illustrates the flexibility of a commission for the blind over an all-encompassing Department of Rehabilitation.
The 55-staff member commission for the blind placed 114 blind people in jobs last year, with an average weekly salary of $423. The blind population in Oregon numbers about 70,000 -- about one-tenth California's number of blind and severely visually impaired. But the Oregon
Commission for the Blind placed in jobs one-third as many as were placed by the Department of Rehabilitation.
Frank Synoground, assistant director of rehabilitation services for the Oregon Commission for the Blind and a former California resident, said that the commission is "more consumer-driven" than a rehabilitation agency that serves all disabilities. Four of the seven commission board members are blind, he said. The administrator of the agency serves "at the pleasure of the board," he said, rather than as a political appointee.
Yet, some critics say a small organization wouldn't be practical in a state like California because it would duplicate $25 million in administrative services that are already done by the Department of Rehabilitation.
Even if that's true, commission supporters argue, employed blind people would more than make up for the money.
There are more than 100,000 blind people of working age in the state who aren't paying taxes and are collecting welfare, disability payments and other forms of public assistance, said Bashin said, who estimates those programs cost taxpayers $10,000 a year per person.
Dan Kysor, director of governmental affairs for the California Council of the Blind, is supporting a bill that would set up a nine-member commission -- including at least five blind or visually impaired members - for the blind in California.
He's enlisted the support of state Sen. John Burton, who introduced SB105, a bill to establish a Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
Burton said the Department of Rehabilitation "grossly underutilized" the services of California's 30 community agencies that serve the blind.
Although Kysor said he expects the majority of legislators to support the bill, he expects resistance to come from the governor's office.
A spokesman for the governor had no comment on the commission bill since it was submitted only recently and hadn't been reviewed yet.
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