Center’s Quiet Toil Helps Tackle a ‘Hidden’ Disability

I don’t know how these people in social services do it. I see a kitty up in a tree, and I want to write a check to someone. Thinking of troubled human beings caught in the fearsome game of survival gets too depressing. A couple of weeks on the job as a social worker, seeing the vastness of the problems and the human toll it takes, and I’d be looking at the lumber supply business.

Bob Salinas is only 31, perhaps too young to be a burnout candidate. But as director of a small, private, nonprofit center in Irvine that specializes in helping people with learning disabilities, Salinas learns daily about successes and failures.

He remembers the day that a parent of one of the center’s clients called to say her son had been arrested and another parent called to say she was taking her son back into her home, thereby getting him off the streets.

In the social service biz, you win some and lose some.

Salinas’ center, the Guidance Center for the Learning Disabled, is slowly getting back on its feet. As recently as last summer, the operation was down to a borrowed phone and an answering machine, but it got a generous private donation that has helped it sustain itself.

It is one of those operations you normally wouldn’t hear about. All it does is go about its business in virtual anonymity and every so often help turn a life around.

Its clients are classified as “learning disabled,” a sort of in-between category of people who aren’t mentally retarded but who aren’t able to function without help. Indeed, their IQs tend to be average or higher than average but, Salinas said, if you asked 10 people with learning disabilities to fill out an application form, only two would do it correctly.

The clinical term for their problem is “brain dysfunction,” which in layman’s terms, Salinas said, means “their wiring is mixed up.” To employers or co-workers, the disability might come across as flakiness or laziness or irresponsibility.

The disability might manifest itself in near-comic ways. For instance, Salinas tells of the man who was complimented by his boss for doing a good job. The next time the employee saw his boss coming at the workplace, he stopped working, dropped his equipment, called out to the boss by his first name and went over and shook his hand. To his way of thinking, receiving a compliment from the boss warranted such a response.

Or, Salinas said, someone with a disability might show up at an office five minutes before closing time and want to fill out an application form. Typically, they would hurriedly fill out the form, make a series of mistakes on it, then want to see the supervisor for an on-the-spot personal interview.

While that might sound humorous, it has tragic overtones, both for the job-seeker and society, Salinas said.

For employers who don’t understand disabilities, such behavior might lead to the person’s dismissal. Or, more likely, repeated efforts to find work would be thwarted by the person’s inability to master simple job-interview techniques. Such a pattern of failure can easily lead to myriad problems for society, including homelessness or crime, Salinas said.

“This is a disability that’s different,” Salinas said. “It’s silent, it’s hidden.”

While some employers might have no problems hiring someone who is visibly handicapped and then giving the person a specific rote chore, someone with a learning disability poses a potentially more complex challenge for employers and co-workers, who might not understand the behavioral quirks.

Salinas has a vision for the center, which now has eight clients. He’s hoping it can evolve into an “independent living” center, where the clients can live away from their families. Stories of 30-year-old people with learning disabilities still living with their parents are not uncommon.

This weekend, the center is having a reunion for some of its past clients who are now working and putting their lives together. Over the years, Salinas said, the center has placed about 300 people in jobs.

Chances are that the reunion won’t get any press coverage. I probably wouldn’t have heard of the center, either, except that a San Clemente woman called to say how good a job it was doing for her long-troubled dyslexic grandson. So, I did a little ruminating.

Three hundred people in jobs who might otherwise have slipped through the cracks in society.

In the grand scheme of things, maybe that’s a paltry number.

But just knowing that there are operations such as the center out there, fighting the good fight without much public fanfare, is worth some applause.

Come to think of it, it’s probably things like the reunion this weekend that explain why these people stay in the business.

You don’t get rich, but giving some hope to a potentially lost soul isn’t a bad legacy.