HomeMy WebLinkAboutIthaca Journal Article - DAC - Employment Opportunities for DisabledDisability center comes into limelight;�s
HEATHER MARTIN /Joumal Staff
ON THE JOB: Robert Wentworth, 59, a client of Challenge Industries, cleans Ide's Bowling Lanes on Judd Falls Road. He got his job
through Challenge's supported work program, headed by his job coach, Lisa Witchey. Witchey is among the job coaches trained by the
Cornell University Program on Employment and Disability.
ADAhe
By HELEN MUNDELL
Journal Staff
Cornell program's profile,
For 25 years, the Human Services
Administration Program at Cornell's School of
Industrial and Labor Relations has labored in
relatively obscurity to carry out its work help-
ing rehabilitation centers like Ithaca's
Challenge Industries.
"We run on a tight budget," said Susanne
Bruyere, director. "We're entrepreneurial.
We've survived 25 years on soft money."
But in the last 15 months, a sweeping new
federal law has dramatically raised the pro-
gram's visibility and expanded it to a $500,000 -
a -year operation. The department is now
called the Program on Employment and
Disability to reflect the fact that it is immersed
in training and technical assistance to business
and labor unions under the 1990 Americans
with Disabilities Act (ADA).
The Cornell'program has been designated
the national center for developing educational
materials to help businesses and labor unions
comply with ADA regulations and a regional
ADA training division and assistance center.
"ADA compliance is just good human rela-
tions practices," Bruyere said. "Arranging
accommodation should be an informal, inter-
active process. It need not be conflict ridden or
contentious."
The training division recently conducted a
workshop for about 30 supervisors and man-
agers at Knight Ridder Financial Services in
New York City.
"They got an increased awareness of the
effects of the ADA and a better understanding
of working with persons with disabilities," said
Curt Walters, a Knight Ridder trainer.
In addition to the ADA work, the program
runs the Southern Tier Transition Technical
Assistance Center, which helps school districts
meet a new federal mandate to help students
with disabilities in the transition from school
to work. And, while doing all that, the program
is continuing its long -time work in training
staff for rehabilitation centers.
The umbrella program has eight staff mem-
bers and four part -time student employees. In
addition the program will have several interns
from the ILR School during the spring.
The ILR School founded the program in the
1960s to perform research and training to
improve management of rehabilitation agen-
cies that work with people with physical and
mental disabilities.
Lisa Witchey of Challenge Industries, an
Ithaca workshop and rehabilitation center,
learned to be a job coach for developmentally
disabled people through the Cornell program.
"The different skills they taught were very
helpful in dealing with behavioral problems,
problem solving," she said.
Milt Goldstein, Challenge's director for the
last eight years, had kind words for the pro-
gram and Bruyere, who has served on
Challenge's board. He said the program has
been in the forefront of the trend in the reha-
bilitation field to integrate people with disabil-
ities into the community.
"A lot of her training is to give people the
skills to do that," he said.
Cornell's transition center will work with
school districts to give their students the same
skills, as mandated by new federal regulations.