Fair’s Aim: To Expand Job Awareness of Handicapped

Three years ago, Josh Millman of Costa Mesa went job-hunting at a big career education fair at the Anaheim Convention Center.

Tuesday, Millman returned for another session of that annual event, but this time he attended as an honored guest of the seventh Orange County “Career Awareness Day,” the only career fair in Southern California for handicapped high school and college-age youth.

Millman, now 22, spoke at a panel session called “Federal Job Opportunities: Special Placement Programs,” where he told the audience about his experiences as a handicapped student.

In 1983 Millman was a learning-handicapped graduate of Mardan School, a private special education school in Costa Mesa, when he met Peggy Oliver, the employee relations manager for the U.S. Post Office in Santa Ana, at the education fair.

Tired of working in a hardware sales job that “didn’t have the benefits” or security he wanted, Millman followed Oliver’s advice to “call (her) every week” to see if there were openings available.

Eventually his persistence paid off. By early 1985 he was hired as a mail processor to work the sophisticated mail-sorting machines that had just been installed at the county’s main mail facility in Santa Ana.

“Career Awareness Day” was designed to provide information about how handicapped youths can find jobs and to bring together young people like Millman with prospective employers like Oliver, said Caryl Miller, Orange County’s special education coordinator.

This year the free, open-to-the-public fair drew about 4,500 participants from all 28 of Orange County’s school districts, and from Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego and San Bernadino counties, Miller said.

About 75% of U.S. citizens with disabilities are unemployed, according to Miller. Orange County alone has 172,000 handicapped people, about 8% of the total county population, she said, and 28,123 of these are handicapped students currently enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade. More than 50% of the handicapped students in Orange County have learning disabilities, Miller said.

A learning-handicapped student may be quite intelligent but “shows a severe discrepancy between achievement and ability” when academically tested, Miller said.

Impaired Skills

Such students’ difficulties often include lack of eye-hand coordination, visual motor problems and language-processing difficulties that aren’t the result of “cultural or environmental” factors, Miller said.

At the fair Tuesday, young people chose from 14 workshops with topics like “Reaching Your Highest Potential” and “Employment Possibilities in the Construction Industry,” viewed films designed to inform and motivate them to find jobs and met 110 potential private industry and public employers at booth displays.

A sprinkling of parents and special education professionals were in attendance.

Jointly sponsored by the Orange County Department of Education and the Anaheim Union High School District, the job fair was underwritten by $5,500 in donations from local businesses.

Commitment to Hiring

On the federal job opportunities panel, Iris Greenberg, an employment opportunities specialist for the Internal Revenue Service’s Los Angeles district, and Oliver discussed what Greenberg called the federal government’s “strong commitment to hiring the handicapped” through its selective placement program.

Under this program, Greenberg said, any handicapped person certified by the California Department of Rehabilitation as having “one or more major life faculties impaired” can “apply to almost any federal agency, have the (qualifying) tests waived and come aboard.”

For example, IRS positions in all fields are available to handicapped individuals who have the necessary skills, according to Greenberg. Learning-handicapped individuals can work in data entry and retrieval, mail handling, general clerical work and the tax examination department of the IRS, she said.

To facilitate hiring the blind, hearing-impaired and physically disabled, the IRS is set up with high-tech Brailling devices, sign language interpreters and accessible work areas, Greenberg said.

About 7% of the IRS district’s work force in Los Angeles is handicapped, she added.

Oliver said handicapped individuals fill positions as window clerks, carriers, mail handlers, distribution clerks, mail forwarders and letter sorters in Orange County post offices.

However, she added that only 35 of between 300 and 400 individuals hired by the Santa Ana Post Office last year were handicapped. Just under 6% of the employees at that central Orange County post office are handicapped, she said.

Getting the Job

To get jobs, handicapped applicants “have to have some work history that shows they want to work, that they’re reliable,” Oliver said. “We like to do a thorough screening and . . . make sure the job fits the person.”

“Josh (Millman) is one of our success stories,” she added. “He already comes to me once a month (to talk) about what he’s going to do next, to go higher in pay. . . . He’s a very conscientious employee. We don’t call him handicapped.”

Handicapped people have “much better (work) opportunities now than they’ve ever had,” said Grace King, a labor market analyst for the North Orange County Regional Occupational Program, a vocational training program that serves high school students and adults in the Anaheim, Brea-Olinda, Placentia, Fullerton and Los Alamitos school districts.

“I think they (handicapped people) have to believe in themselves enough to know they have an incredible number of aids (to employment)--both with employers and with the public mindset,” said King, who led a workshop called “Jobs of the Future.”

More Open to Hiring

These days, King said, “I find that businesses I contact are much more open (to hiring people with) physical or mental disabilities.”

Over the last 20 years, she added, federal legislation has made it increasingly difficult for employers to discriminate against hiring the handicapped.

Learning-handicapped people may actually have an advantage in jobs that utilize the most modern technology, King said.

“The (learning) handicapped have more courage about (learning) the automation process” because they usually don’t have preconceived ideas about its difficulty, she said.

Surprising Success

In addition, the moderately learning-handicapped often do well with automotive and construction work, for instance, “but these are not fields you’d ordinarily think of for the person with special needs.”

“People with handicaps can be accommodated in every field,” King said. “Be a possibility thinker, and do what you want to do because the possibilities are out there,” she told workshop participants.

Representatives of cities, colleges, job-training services and public and private employers answered participants’ questions at booths set up in one convention center room, while interviews were conducted for those seeking summer jobs in a jobmobile outside the hall.

Glen Garson, a special education teacher, said he had come to the educational event with several other teachers and 42 handicapped students from Savanna High School in Anaheim. He had made the rounds of the booths, picking up information about work opportunities, he said.

The event “is as good a thing as I’ve gone to . . . to get exposure to jobs for kids,” he said.

However, Wendy Mason, a special education teacher from Magnolia High School in Anaheim, said she was somewhat disappointed in the event.

The employers’ booths didn’t have enough “gimmicks” to attract the attention of learning-handicapped and developmentally disabled students, she said.

Not a Field Trip

“They (the students) need something flashy to draw them in. . . . This doesn’t interest them.”

However, “Career Awareness Day” was “not supposed to be a field trip” but, instead, an educational session “to try and encourage interaction between the student and the employer,” Miller said.

Teachers were asked to prepare their students in advance to be serious about the job research opportunity, Miller added.

Such self-initiated research is particularly important for students with non-physical handicaps because these students face a tougher job market after graduation than do the physically handicapped, Miller added.

Hidden Handicaps

Technological advances have provided tools to help “the (job) market open greatly for the physically disabled,” she said, but learning-handicapped individuals’ “disabilities are hidden” at job application time and may only become evident after hiring. That’s when “a lot of learning-disabled kids lose their jobs,” Miller said.

Yet if a learning-handicapped individual is placed in a job appropriate to his or her skills, “a lot of times (the individual) will do better at the job than they (did) in school. . . . They overcompensate because they’re motivated,” Miller said.

“The job market for all handicapped people looks very promising, but it looks promising only if they have general education skills, good work attitudes and are productive workers--and that’s the requirement for any person, really.”

Before Jan. 1, 1985, federal laws stipulated that a handicapped person lost benefits from Medicare and Supplemental Security Income if he or she began earning money, Miller said.

Change in Law

That law was changed to allow the working handicapped to keep some or all of those benefits.

That encourages them to seek work, she said--and so do such job training programs as a 4-year-old “Workability” program (a cooperative project between the California Department of Education, Employment Development Program and Department of Rehabilitation, administered through the schools) which combines federal and state money to pay part of a handicapped person’s wages in many entry-level positions.

Traditionally, developmentally disabled youth have been trained for assembly-line jobs, “but by the turn of the century, the assembly jobs might not even be around,” Miller said.

Target Occupations

Other occupational target areas include child care, health care, hotel and motel work, fast foods, custodial and office occupations, she said.

One job-seeker was Carolyn Pfeiffer, 26, who is taking part in Project Independence, a state-funded Anaheim program which helps developmentally disabled young adults learn to live and work on their own, and who came to “Career Awareness Day” hoping to find a position.

She said she was a little discouraged because none of the employers staffing booths seemed ready to hire someone right away. However, she added that she had picked up some general job information, and she still was determined to find work.

“Most of all I’d like to take care of handicapped people,” said Pfeiffer, who has in the past worked for Goodwill Industries but is presently unemployed.

Child care is another area of interest to her, she said, because working with “little children, that’s my thing.” If she couldn’t find a job in either of those areas, Pfeiffer added, she’d consider landscape or janitorial work.

She wants a job where she can help other people, Pfeiffer said, but “it’s not for the money--it’s for the enjoyment of life.”