It’s 2016, a brand new year. It’s a time for us to honor the past and look to the future. So it is with disability trends.
What’s Out:
Group homes. Facilities across the nation that serve people with severe disabilities in large group settings have come under attack for a variety of reasons. Many private group home facilities have collected a record of abuses as egregious as the old institutional settings they replaced. These group settings often leave little room for individuality. Imagine living in your college dorm for the rest of your life.
Sheltered workshops. Historically, people with disabilities were most likely to find job opportunities in these segregated settings, often focused on assembly work. Sheltered workshops rarely paid even minimum wage, gave no opportunity for people with disabilities to build relationships with others without disabilities and rarely resulted in the acquisition of skills that would lead the worker to a real community job.
Dropping out. The U.S. Department of Education has reported a 4.1 percent rise in graduation rates among students with disabilities in the past three years.
What’s In:
Person-centered approach. Federal requirements for providers of services to people with disabilities are pushing the system toward a more “person-centered approach.” This approach centers on the individual’s personal goals and values. Rather than requiring the individual to conform to the limited options available through the system, the system would be built around the person. The approach will require significant changes to state level regulations and funding mechanisms before it can be fully realized.
Community Employment. The goal for all people with disabilities is real work in a real community setting. While rates of employment for individuals with disabilities continue to lag behind non-disabled peers, some organizations are getting more creative in how training programs for people with disabilities are designed. A new convention center in Indiana will be populating its workforce with people with disabilities. The first class of trainees will start Monday. The trainees will be operating a real, functioning hotel and gaining skills they can use in a variety of settings.
Hate crimes. Unfortunately, not all trends are positive. While disability bias accounted for only 1.4 percent of all hate crimes in 2014, the number is on the rise from 92 incidents in 2013 to 95 in 2014, according to records of the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
Technology. From the use of tablets for communication to improvements in prosthetic devices and the rise of medical hacking, technology is slowly but surely reducing the impacts of disabilities. Just do an Internet search on “brain organoids” to see how much we may be able to achieve with disabilities in the near future.
Look at all we’ve achieved the realm of disabilities during our recent history – deinstitutionalization, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Community-Based Services. Then imagine what we’ll achieve in the years to come. Perhaps some of those advances will be in the year ahead. Happy 2016!
Tara Kiene is the director of case management with Community Connections Inc.
