By CRAIG FREILICH

Grassroots efforts, protests, and meetings with officials in Albany have moved the debate over closing work centers for disabled people back toward their continuation in St. Lawrence County.

“We’re at a point where all these advocacy efforts have made a difference,” said St. Lawrence NYSARC Executive Director Daphne Pickert, who has been concerned about state plans to close the workshops.

SLNYSARC now maintains two sheltered workshops, one in Ogdensburg that has contracts for work with New York Air Brake, ACCO and DeFelsko, plus a deposit-bottle redemption center, and another in Massena with a large bottle redemption center and contracts with Time Warner and a drum-kit maker.

“At one point, we had 300-plus in sheltered workshops” working at NYSARC’s Seaway Industries, Pickert said. That number is now down to 78, after several rounds of cuts to the organization, and the closure of a center in Hermon last year.

After a protest in Albany in May, a compromise appears to have emerged from the state’s Office for People with Developmental Disabilities over the future of sheltered workshops in the state, work centers where people with developmental disabilities can find a job, and benefit from the routine outside of home and the self-respect a job can engender.

SLNYSARC and other NYSARC organizations in the state felt threatened as the state-mandated closure of the workshops seemed to be proceeding to a finale within five or six years.

But NYSARC has mustered enough support to prompt a shift in the OPWDD toward a compromise that could save the program, with some changes.

The tentative compromise, as it has been explained so far, would permit the workshops to keep operating but with 25 percent of the workers coming from the pool of workers who are not disabled.

“If you have a work center with 40 people, 30 could be disabled and 10 would be independent employees without disabilities,” said Pickert.

But she cautions the plan is not final and the discussion should continue.

“People with disabilities make excellent employees,” Pickert said. “They are faithful, loyal and dedicated. We’ve had some in jobs for over 20 years.”

A Supreme Court decision aimed at “mainstreaming” disabled people has been interpreted in New York to mean that the work centers, which have been specifically created to get disabled people into jobs, would have to close, and those that work in them would have to enter the general job market. But, Pickert says that puts them at a disadvantage and lowers the chances that they can find work outside the NYSARC system.

In what is known as the Olmstead decision, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999 ruled that those work centers represent unjustified segregation of people with disabilities and constitutes discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The court decision has been coupled with consistent drop over a decade or more in state aid to agencies outside of government that help developmentally disabled people.

Pickert had been deeply concerned because the court ruling has been interpreted to mean that people now in special work settings should be moved to regular workplaces.

“The elimination of sheltered workshops as an option for employment for people with developmental disabilities is causing major concerns,” she said in February. “The intent certainly is to create full integration, which is laudable, however not realistic, at least in our county.”

The work centers have been a particular achievement of NYSARC chapters around the state. People who can work, but maybe not at what is considered full capacity, can get and hold jobs once their ability has been evaluated and a fractional rate of pay is determined by the state Labor Department by measuring their output. This has allowed these people the dignity of working like most other people, and gets them out into the world rather than leaving them isolated and undervalued.

“There is much more discussion now about the impact of the ultimate closure” of the workshops, Pickert said. “The grassroots effort has really had an impact. I believe the result will be to keep us going.”