From the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:
A program aimed at moving Arkansas youths from the disability rolls to employment is showing early signs of success, according to Brent Thomas Williams, an associate professor of counselor education at the University of Arkansas. ...
Williams is principal investigator for Arkansas Promise, a five-year, $36 million program focused on finding jobs and opportunities for Arkansas teenagers who receive Supplemental Security Income. ...
Richard Luecking of the Center for Transition and Career Innovation at the University of Maryland said early reports from all six projects are highly encouraging. ...
After 18 months, participants in all six pilot projects were more successful at finding work than members of a control group. In four cases, they also saw their earnings increase by a statistically significant amount, according to Mathematica Policy Research, a Princeton, N.J.-based organization that analyzed the data.
The Arkansas experiment, which wraps up this year, surpassed the others, however, in terms of youth employment and youth earnings.
Roughly 2,000 Arkansas youths participated in the research project. Half received Arkansas Promise services; the others did not.
Participants received training, "intensive case management" and assistance finding jobs. An earned income exclusion allowed them to make money without jeopardizing their SSI payments.
Fifty-six percent of the participants in Arkansas Promise said they had held paying jobs, compared with 20 percent in the control group, officials said. Arkansas Promise participants reported earnings in the previous year of $1,960. The control group had earnings of $747. ...In general, I'm very pessimistic about programs to encourage disability benefits recipients returning to work. There's a long history of failure. However, I don't feel that way about youth transition programs. Young people have a far greater capacity to make adaptations that allow them to overcome obstacles than do older people. I've seen too many cases where young people with developmental disabilities leave high school without receiving any help in making the transition to employment. Predictably, they fail to hold down jobs. Give them a counselor to help point them in the right direction and help them find employment and then give them a job coach and many can make it.
7 comments:
agree that the younger you are the easier it is to transition to work (hence, the grids). A few things to consider:
a) kids who are already getting SSI before turning 18 are living in low-income, low-asset families. They have two sets of challenges--poverty and disability--and any intervention needs to be sensitive to both.
b) kids who are not already getting SSI but who may apply when they turn 18 and parental income is no longer deemed also may have work capacity and more can be done to encourage it. But it can be harder to find those kids.
c) useful interventions are going to cost a lot. Probably more each month than SSI, for a lot of young people, and many people may need them for a long time. Doesn't mean we should avoid such interventions. Does mean we should not expect them to save money.
d) SSA is not the best entity to do or fund these programs. Department of Labor, Education, state voc rehab, etc. make a lot more sense. SSA's role should be to quickly and accurately adjudicate if someone qualifies for benefits and make sure to pay them the correct amount. Providing information about work incentives and how earnings affect SSA benefits (such as through the WIPA agencies, and on the website) also makes sense.
re: 5:39pm
SSA might have "collaborated", but they are neither funding or running this program. The Promise program is simply tailored to take advantage of an already existing SSA provision, the SSI student earned income exclusion, which turned out to be especially complementary to the needs of the study.
Other than probably helping to select qualifying beneficiaries through data sharing agreements, SSA has had little to no actual involvement in this program.
The other State agencies do not have the funding to do that. Also, it is usually the parents who benefit by keeping the ADHD and Asthma hidden getting a check as they are the Rep Payees.
Re: 6:08
SSA has been partnering with the Department of Education on PROMISE from the beginning, including the overall design, and is responsible for a national evaluation.
SSA's site: https://www.ssa.gov/disabilityresearch/promise.htm
ED's site: https://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/promise/index.html
A huge swath of the youth on SSI will not be on SSI as adults simply because they cannot meet the adult definition of disabled.
As other comments note, this is a population that starts with two big problems, overcoming poverty and having some sort of impairment. Any sort of transition program is an improvement.
Bravo 5:39 and others who note that these programs aren't free but do pay off. We do have the problem of SSI children coming from poverty already.
Part of the success is probably due to the fact that the economy is a near full employment. Employers are desperate for workers.
It is always harder for people with physical or mental limitations of find a keep work when they are competing with able bodied people during an economic downturn.
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