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.