Their Graduation Comes With Fear

His brain locked in infancy, Andrew Thomas tore off his graduation gown and crawled to his mother’s knees--a shaky start to his first day of adulthood.

Thomas, 22, who is autistic and retarded, was one of eight students to graduate last week from the Speech and Language Development Center in Buena Park, a private school for students from infancy to 22 with multiple disabilities and behavior problems.

He spent most of the ceremony lying by his mother, who stroked his dark hair as she worried about his future, since his erratic behavior prevents him from working or joining most programs for disabled adults.

Graduation isn’t always a time to celebrate. For people with disabilities, graduation often marks a frightening time, an emergence from sheltered programs that provided as much specialized help as they needed to a future with limited possibilities and even fewer places to go.

When they turn 22, the legal right to a free, appropriate education expires under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, passed in 1975 to bring the nation’s disabled children out of institutions and into schools.

“All the systems tell them that they’re adults, but they’re not,” said Sandra Sternig-Babcock, executive director of the Dubnoff Center, a North Hollywood school for the disabled. “There’s this gaping hole out there in services for these people who are youngsters in every way but actual age.”

The problem isn’t money, since the state’s Department of Developmental Services arranges funding for adults with substantial developmental disabilities, such as cerebral palsy and autism, to join appropriate groups or programs.

“The problem is the lack of programs for the range of disabilities,” said Dawn O’Connell, program director at the Speech and Language Development Center. “There are people who would pay out of their own pockets for good programs, if only they could find them.”

Many programs offer little more than the equivalent of baby-sitting, perhaps taking students on field trips to the library or mall, said Christa Baysa of Cerritos, whose daughter, Christy, graduated from Speech and Language last year.

Now 23, her physically and verbally disabled daughter is in a Cypress College independent-living program that teaches academic subjects as well as cooking and grocery-shopping skills.

“It’s ridiculous to sit nonreaders down in a library to do nothing, just to have a place to put them for a few hours,” Baysa said. “I see better things for my daughter than sitting around killing time.”

Baysa hopes her daughter will find a job that uses her abilities but isn’t beyond her grasp. While in school she had such jobs, for example, stocking clothes at Kmart.

Lack of Social Skills

More challenging than finding a job is making employers understand when their disabled employees lack social skills, said O’Connell. “Employers feel they can teach our students to do the work, but that it’s our duty to teach them how to be employees,” she said.

And some employers will reject them anyway because they appear so physically disabled, she said.

A string of dismissals from department and grocery stores sent John Anchando, now 31, back to the Speech and Language Development Center a year after he graduated in 1989. For the last 12 years, he has worked there as a teaching assistant. At the center, others understand his attention deficit disorder and diabetes complications, and the work is more productive than going to a recreational program each day, he said.

“I’m still really scared of what’s out there,” the Whittier man said. “Being disabled and all that, the transition has been a lot more challenging than I expected.”

For those who aren’t hired or are incapable of holding a job, group homes, day programs and institutions are the usual options. However, those programs and places can be a shock to people used to the sheltering environment of a school like the development center, where turnover is low and one-to-one aides are commonplace.

The school’s warmth and accepting attitudes were evident at the recent graduation.

A video that showed a student’s attempt--albeit a failed one--at a basketball shot drew loud applause, and one graduate triggered gentle laughter when he haltingly thanked a teacher for “help with my swearing and my science project.”

For parents like Lydia Castro, whose daughter, Brianne, will graduate next year, the school’s success had given them false hope for future placements.

“I was living in an imaginary world when I thought we could find another environment like that,” said Castro, of Lakewood.

In many adult programs, whose budgets ebb and flow with the economy, low pay and unstable funding often mean a revolving door of poorly trained personnel, O’Connell said.

“By the time they start setting up relationships with each other, the employees are off to something else that pays better,” she said. “It’s not their fault, but they get burned out.”

A ‘Double Whammy’

That instability in caretakers scares Castro, whose 21-year-old daughter has the mental capacity of a toddler and requires constant supervision.

“It’s a double whammy because my daughter has no way of defending herself against anything,” she said. “We’re pretty limited as to what kind of environment we can choose.”

Progress has been made since the mid-1980s, when a nationwide survey found a “severe discrepancy” between existing programs and the needs of disabled adults.

Since then, programs for the disabled have made a greater effort to create job opportunities, said Nancy Reder, deputy executive director of the Assn. of State Directors of Special Education.

“People understand better now that sheltered workshops aren’t good futures,” she said. “They’re looking to help people actually be productive members of society.”

Although most parents said they want to involve their children in deciding their futures, their lack of communication skills sometimes makes it difficult. Most of the students who recently graduated from the development center cannot speak.

Juan Salazar Jr., who stuffed his fingers in his ears when he heard the crowd’s applause, will join a program that teaches computer skills.

His parents’ struggles with the bureaucracy of arranging their autistic son’s care are aggravated because they speak only Spanish and he doesn’t speak at all.

“It’s heartbreaking when you don’t know if your decisions are making your baby happy,” said Margarita Salazar, of Compton.

Andrew Thomas’ mother, Janet, explored dozens of programs before finding one she hopes will make her son happy.

“He knows things are changing, but he can’t understand why,” said Thomas, of Rancho Palos Verdes.

“He’s anxious, and it’s hard on the family to see him so fretful. We can only hope the new place even remotely approaches what this place does for him.”