Handicapped Students Go to Work : Program Places Youths in Jobs While Still in School

Jessie Hamilton put his right hand over his heart and made rapid movements with the fingers of his left hand.

“I love it here,” signed the 19-year-old kitchen worker, smiling broadly.

Where would Hamilton like to be in half a century? “Here. Right here,” responded the profoundly deaf youth.

“Here” is the kitchen at the UCLA Medical Center, where Hamilton works, thanks to a Los Angeles Unified School District program called Work Ability I.

Prepares Students

Jointly sponsored by the state Departments of Education and Rehabilitation and the school district, the 5-year-old program prepares severely handicapped students for employment.

Like about 170 other Los Angeles high school juniors and seniors in Work Ability I this year, Hamilton has been placed by the school district in a job while he is still in school. Most of the students work two hours a day, and get both pay and academic credit for their efforts.

About 150 other handicapped students in Work Ability I are getting special instruction on how to get and keep jobs, although they won’t be placed in work situations, said Jane Lugo, the school district’s Work Ability I coordinator.

“If you don’t catch them while they’re in high school, most of these handicapped kids will be either unemployed or underemployed for the rest of their lives,” said Gail Zittel, director of Work Ability I for the state Department of Education. “They often don’t know how to get into the system once they’re out of school. Nor do most of their parents know how to get their kids into the system.”

Without Work Ability I, “girls (now in the program) would stay home and get pregnant and never get married, boys would stay home and watch television and collect their welfare checks,” said Harry R. Schmoll Jr., the school district’s coordinator of special education, senior high schools unit.

Zittel, who agreed with Schmoll, emphasized the excellence of the the Los Angeles program, one of some 130 Work Ability I programs covering 193 California school districts.

“L.A. Unified has, by far, the biggest population of handicapped kids of any district in the state,” she said, noting that Work Ability I programs were established in Culver City and Bellflower at the same time as Los Angeles Unified, and 20 more programs have started since then throughout the county.

“The City of L.A. is like a whole state because they’ve got so many kids in their district,” Zittel said.

“They chose a very difficult group to serve: the hard of hearing and deaf students as a starting point, then they moved to the visually impaired and multiply handicapped,” she said.

“I am so pleased with L.A. Unified that I am ecstatic. They are dedicated and innovative. I’m excited about L.A.”

Zittel expects about 6,000 handicapped high school students to take part in the statewide program this school year. About three-fifths of them will receive minimum wage through the program, and most of the rest will be paid by private employers. Some will work on a volunteer basis.

For 1985-86 the state has budgeted $3.5 million for Work Ability I, plus $1.75 million in federal funds over which the state has discretion. Contributions from local school districts, businesses, groups and individuals will increase the overall budget by about 87%, Zittel said.

Some Volunteers

Of the approximately 170 Los Angeles school district students who will get jobs through the program, roughly three-fourths will work in the private sector and the rest mostly in school cafeteria, maintenance and day-care center jobs. Approximately a quarter of the student workers will volunteer. The rest will be paid, either by the companies for which they work, or through a stipend from Work Ability I funds.

The Los Angeles school district allocates personnel time to Work Ability I valued at about $270,000. Additional state and federal funding comes to $105,000.

Some Work Ability I students realize remarkable achievements.

Jerome Young, an 18-year-old Marshall High School student, was blinded in a gang-related shooting when he as 10. Today, the young entrepreneur works at home, repairing radios and small appliances. He also installs radios in cars, makes radio cabinets in his high school wood shop and repairs bicycles for his friends.

Young’s principal workshop is his tiny bedroom, so crowded with boxes of radio and bicycle parts, not to mention radios, speakers and the general mess that tends to accompany teen-aged boys, that a sighted person would have trouble finding anything in the room. Young, however, seems to have no trouble.

The other day he pulled a board out of the mess, found a soldering iron and produced a box so full of tangled electrical wires and knobs that they looked like wrestling spiders. Sitting on his bed, using the board for a workbench, Young demonstrated how he solders wires onto electrical terminals.

Marilyn Gruen, Young’s vocational transition instructor, is trying to place him in a job, either at an appliance repair shop or a bicycle repair shop.

Darren Gaines, 16, another of Gruen’s students, didn’t need help finding a job, even though everything further than three or four feet from his eyes is a total blur.

After attending Work Ability I Career Club sessions at Marshall High School, where he learned interviewing skills, Gaines applied to Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s L.A.-Pico store, went through three interviews and a written test and was hired.

Gaines, who has had impaired vision since birth, works in customer service, wrapping gifts, organizing layaway purchases and taking returned merchandise back to the proper departments.

“I had no idea he had a problem,” said his boss, Pat D’Ambrisi. “He came in and applied for a job. He was tested and he tested well. He works real well. I intend to keep him working here as long as he continues to do the job as well as he does it now, which is as well as it can be done.”

D’Ambrisi said that because of Gaines’ excellent work she would welcome applications from other handicapped workers.

At the Jack-in-the-Box restaurant on Western Avenue in San Pedro, manager Ishrat Ali had much the same reaction as D’Ambrisi.

Ali hired Barry Mullin, a 21-year-old Work Ability I student with Down’s syndrome. Mullin spends two hours daily on chores like vacuuming, cleaning tables, washing windows, filling condiment containers and keeping the grounds clean.

“If he will learn what I want, we will hire him” in June when he finishes school, the manager said, noting that Mullin is a cooperative worker who is popular with the rest of the staff.

Best Way to Teach

Mullin’s Work Ability I teacher, Valerie Mackay, said the best way to teach her student is to go through his required duties with him.

At UCLA Medical Center, where he is director of the department of nutrition, David Scheible also was supportive of hiring Work Ability I students.

Scheible, in whose department the deaf kitchen worker Jessie Hamilton works, said deaf workers “definitely are as good as other employes. It takes a little longer to train them, but they make up for it with enthusiasm and ambition.”

Besides Hamilton, six other Work Ability I students with serious hearing problems have jobs at UCLA Medical Center.

Monique Williams, 17, a hearing impaired student at Marlton School for the Deaf in Baldwin Hills, who works in the medical center pharmacy, said that before entering Work Ability I she thought she would go through life without a job.

And Patricia Maxey, 20, a profoundly deaf student from Marlton, said she appreciates Work Ability I because, “I didn’t want to stay home looking at myself. All my friends collect SSI and it’s not much, and I want more than that.”

Ironically, SSI--Supplemental Security Income that the Social Security Administration provides the handicapped--is one of Work Ability I’s biggest road blocks.

“We have parents who have refused to allow their kids to work because they fear losing the SSI. It happens a lot,” said Mark Stephens, the Los Angeles school district’s coordinator of vocational education for the handicapped.

SSI payments range from $533 to $597 a month. When a handicapped student takes a job, the payments end, along with certain state medical benefits. Parents, many of whom have little confidence in their handicapped children, fear that if the jobs don’t last the SSI and medical benefits will be hard to get back, Stephens observed.

Significant numbers of parents won’t let their children take jobs, said Janne Shirley, a Work Ability I teacher.

“The parents really hold on,” she said. “For the most part, they don’t encourage their children’s independence.”

“One of the biggest problems I face,” teacher Gruen said , is the low expectations parents (of visually impaired youngsters) have for their children.”

One goal of the program is to educate the students about the advantages of work and how they should act on the job.

“What was so overwhelming (when the program started) was that our kids were so clue-less,” said Nancy Walker, the first teacher in the Los Angeles program. “They didn’t know they would have to make decisions. Decisions had always been made for them.”

Teachers like Walker commonly put in extra hours finding students jobs, being sure the jobs get done correctly and generally making certain their students don’t remain “clueless.”

Many of the handicapped youngsters have never taken a bus or used an elevator. Some of the 18- and 20-year-olds can’t spell past the second-grade level, can’t fill out applications and haven’t learned the most rudimentary social skills, such as how to shake hands.

“The problems are massive,” Walker said. “But they are problems due to the fact that these young people haven’t been exposed to common, everyday skills. Once they know what they are supposed to learn, they learn it. You and I have numerous opportunities to succeed or fail, but most handicapped students have been protected from failure and have been considered incapable of things they can do perfectly well.

“So our job is to teach perfectly teachable handicapped kids some perfectly simple skills. Once we’ve done that, the kids can get their foot in the door, and that’s really about all they need: a good start toward a decent job.”