The Disabled Find Opening Into Future : Jobs: A program that began locally is now a global model of how to help people become valuable members of the work force.

Tom Noonan, who spends his workday corralling and pushing shopping carts, quite possibly is the happiest employee at a warehouse store in the San Fernando Valley.

Rain or shine, he herds the carts while beaming the brightest of smiles. Never once has he called in sick or taken vacation since he started at the store two years ago.

With that kind of winning attitude, Noonan is the best kind of employee anyone can ask for, his boss says.

Noonan, 32, who is autistic, is simply happy that he has a job and that he is exceptionally good at it. And he likes not being stressed out at work. Stress would surely knock him flat, as it did in his prior job at a hospital, where he worked as a janitor. He was fired and Noonan thought his future as an employee, anywhere, was over.

The was before Jaime Jessup entered the picture.

Jessup, a job coach with City Community Services of La Canada Flintridge, a program founded several years ago by a local teacher, lined up Noonan’s new position. Then she worked with him daily during the first three weeks, training him in the art of handling shopping carts. Today, Noonan is so good at his job that Jessup visits him only once or twice a week to offer moral support--as she does with all of her 20 clients.

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Though he is immensely satisfied with his present job, Noonan is thinking of the future and investing in himself. He is taking classes to learn electronics assembly. He can make $12 an hour with that job, he says, though he makes “good money” now at $7.55 an hour. That includes, Noonan proudly adds, a 45-cent-per-hour merit raise in September.

With his paycheck from the PACE warehouse store and money from Supplemental Security Income, a federal disability program, Noonan supports his retired parents, who live with him in San Fernando.

“I like this job so much,” Noonan said. “It’s GOOD! I help the (shoppers) put groceries in their cars. They smile and they like me.”

Noonan’s boss, assistant operations manager Hector Arrieta, calls his employee’s performance “outstanding, which is a benefit (to the company) in itself.”

The PACE store in San Fernando currently employs five mentally or physically disabled people through the City program; it hired its first two years ago. The chain of membership warehouse stores also has City clients in its Woodland Hills and El Monte stores, and plans to hire others in Gardena and Torrance.

“They’re happy to be here,” Arrieta said, beaming at Noonan’s smiling face. “It’s true. I couldn’t get a better (employee).”

PACE also reaps benefits in public relations.

“We took on the project to help the community and help the individuals,” Arrieta said. “We are giving back something to the community.”

The nuts and bolts of the City project is carried out by job coaches such as Jessup, who says she learned of discrimination and dejection firsthand after being badly injured in car accident eight years ago.

After operations to repair her left hip, and a lengthy period in a wheelchair, she said, it took five years to regain her ability to walk, albeit with a slight limp. For the first six months, Jessup recalled, she stayed home feeling overwhelmingly lonely and displaced from the rest of the world. Then, a friend gave her the push she needed; a second chance--a job answering the telephone at an auto repair shop. Jessup has been out of bed and mostly out of the house ever since.

“I got the help I needed from my family and friends and now I’m returning it,” Jessup, 30, said. “Everyone has an asset to contribute to society. Some just need a little more help breaking through.”

Jessup, who had studied to be an accountant before her accident, also teaches clients to balance a checkbook, pay the bills, find a roommate, shop and even cook.

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“You don’t do this job for the money. It’s not a five-days-a-week, nine-to-five job,” Jessup said. “You do it because it’s self-gratifying . . . rewarding. You see the results of your help immediately.”

Larry Naeve, a La Canada special-education school administrator, understands that kind of reward. Naeve, who 11 years ago was a special-education teacher, found himself asking the question, “What now?” for his students, who graduated but really had nowhere to go.

A good number of them were not trained to be functional members of the working world and became dependent on social agencies and government programs. Naeve said he could not accept such negation in his student’s lives. He believed they could become productive employees, like anyone else with motivation. He found the answer by starting the City program under the auspices of the school district.

Today, the special-education school is attended by 60 students from La Canada Flintridge, Glendale and Burbank school districts.

The City program has grown so big, that, beginning this year, it is no longer under the auspices of the school system, but is a separate agency operating under the California Department of Rehabilitation with a $1-million budget, five offices in Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, and 80 staff members--50 of them job coaches, to oversee some 600 clients. Some clients are graduates of the school districts but others of all ages are referred to the center by state social agencies.

Since its founding, it has placed well over 1,000 disabled people into the work force in the Los Angeles area. Naeve’s idea is now nationally recognized as a model for such programs and is being duplicated in other parts of Southern California--including Santa Monica, Ventura County and Antelope Valley. In fact, it is so successful it now has global attention. Naeve was recently visited by educators from England, Netherlands and Ireland, who hope to duplicate it.

“People get real jobs and real wages. Their income is greatly increased and they become taxpayers,” Naeve said.

The state government benefits because employed people with disabilities cost the state about half what it does to support those unemployed, Naeve said. Employers benefit because they generally find that they have hired motivated, dedicated and loyal employees who are grateful for the break.

“I went into education to try to make a difference. To make sure that I was doing something productive,” said Naeve, who volunteers hours at the City program.

If it hadn’t been for City, Mark MacLaren, 30, who relies on a wheelchair to get around because of cerebral palsy, still could be unemployed. After a fairly steady work history, he got laid off a year and a half a go and couldn’t find work for six months.

“A lot of people out there don’t want to hire handicaps--people in wheelchairs. You expect that,” said MacLaren, who now works at a Chatsworth firm. “This job gives you a chance.”

“Mark is my first (employee from City) of many, I hope,” said John Cronkrite, owner of JC & P Electronics. “It’s a pay-back, if you really want to know the truth. I also hire people (paroled) from prisons. They need to work. Why not (here)? I’m lucky my business is doing so well. As long as this place is here, Mark has a job.”

MacLaren has been working on an assembly line at the electronics firm since January. Until this job, he said, “I had to live on SSI alone. I’ve been looking for a job for a long time. I’m glad I have this job.”