A Matter of Dignity: How Minnesota is Failing the Disabled

In 2016, Chris Serres, Glenn Howatt and David Joles interviewed dozens of people for their project "A Matter of Dignity". The five-part series on Minnesota's treatment of people with disabilities started as an inquiry into maltreatment and turned into a six-month investigation exposing systematic segregation and neglect of vulnerable adults with disabilities, people who are denied dignity in housing, at the workplace, in gonvernment services, in romance, and intimacy. The project makes these people visible, humans such as an adult with Down syndrome at a garbage dump collecting trash for two dollars an hour (see photograph), workers with brain injuries scrubbing toilets for half the minimum wage, or a woman with bipolar disorder escaping from her group home and throwing herself in front of a speeding car (via).

A Matter of Dignity: How Minnesota is Failing the Disabled
by Chris Serres and Glenn Howat, 2016 (excerpts):

In a field on the outskirts of town, a man with Down syndrome is spending another day picking up garbage. He wears faded pants, heavy gloves, a bright yellow vest, and a name tag that says “Scott Rhude.” His job is futile. Prairie winds blow debris from a landfill nearby faster than he and his coworkers can collect it. In the gray sky overhead, a turkey vulture circles in wide loops. 

Rhude, thirty-three, earns $2 an hour. He longs for more rewarding work—maybe at Best Buy, he says, or a library. But that would require personalized training, a job counselor, and other services that aren’t available. 

“He is stuck, stuck, stuck,” said his mother, Mary Rhude. “Every day that he works at the landfill is a day that he goes backward.” 

Rhude is one of thousands of Minnesotans with disabilities who are employed by facilities known as sheltered workshops. They stuff envelopes, package candy, or scrub toilets for just scraps of pay, with little hope of building better, more dignified lives. Many states, inspired by a new civil rights movement to integrate the disabled into mainstream life, are shuttering places like this. Not Minnesota. It still subsidizes nearly 300 sheltered workshops and is now among the most segregated states in the nation for working people with intellectual disabilities. 

The workshops are part of a larger patchwork of state policies that are stranding legions of disabled Minnesotans on grim margins of society. More than a decade after the US Supreme Court ruled that Americans with disabilities have a right to live in the mainstream, many disabled Minnesotans and their families say they still feel forsaken—mired in profoundly isolating and sometimes dangerous environments they didn’t choose and can’t escape. 

(...) Minnesota pours $220 million annually into the sheltered workshop industry, consigning more than 12,000 adults to isolating and often mindnumbing work. It also relies more than any other state on group homes to house the disabled— often in remote locations where residents are far from their loved ones and vulnerable to abuse and neglect. And when Minnesotans with disabilities seek state assistance to lead more independent lives, many languish for months—even years—on a waiting list that is now one of the longest in the nation. (...)

Other states are far ahead of Minnesota. Vermont has abolished sheltered workshops and moved most of their employees into other jobs. States across New England place nearly three times as many disabled adults in integrated jobs as Minnesota. Washington offers disabled workers nine months of vocational training and career counselors. (...)

The segregation starts early. As a boy in special education classes, Scott Rhude showed talent with computers and photography. But once he graduated from high school, his mother says, he bounced from one segregated workplace to another, never quite escaping a system that has sometimes amounted to little more than what she calls “babysitting.” 

Away from his job, Rhude has built an independent life. He pays his own rent and shares a house with three friends in Willmar, a town of 19,600 west of the Twin Cities. He sings karaoke, goes on double dates, and started his own book club. His bedroom is packed with trophies from Special Olympics events. “I’m not afraid of anything,” he joked recently, flexing his biceps under a poster of a professional wrestler in his bedroom.

But Rhude’s pursuit of independence ends each morning when the city bus drops him off at West Central Industries, a sheltered workshop on the edge of town. From here, a van takes him to the Kandiyohi County landfill, where he spends the next five hours collecting trash on a hillside as big as two football fields. 

Mary Rhude says she and her son hoped the roving work detail would broaden Scott Rhude’s skills and give him exposure to other employers in Willmar. Instead, she says, it has become a “suffocating” experience that keeps her son isolated from the community. Kristine Yost, a job placement specialist for people with disabilities, calls this system “the conveyor belt.” 

“It’s heartbreaking,” she said, “but time and again, young people get pigeonholed as destined for a sheltered workshop, and then they can’t get out.”

In 1999, the US Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling, known as Olmstead, that prohibits states from unnecessarily confining people with disabilities in special homes or workplaces. In a broad reading of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the court said that fairness demands not just access to buses and buildings, but to a life of dignity and respect. People with a wide range of disabilities —including Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and autism—call it their “Brown vs. Board of Education.” 

In the ruling’s aftermath, many governors closed state institutions for the disabled and the US Justice Department sued Oregon and Rhode Island to close sheltered workshops. But, sixteen years later, the movement has yet to take hold in Minnesota. 

Under sustained pressure from a federal judge, Minnesota this fall became one of the last states in the country to adopt a blueprint—known as an Olmstead plan—to expand housing and work options for people with disabilities. County officials and social workers have begun consulting disabled clients about their goals and interests. By 2019 the state expects counties to complete detailed, individualized plans spelling out work and housing options for thousands of disabled adults. 

Yet even if it is executed successfully, the state’s plan calls for only modest increases in the number of disabled adults living and working in the community. It makes no mention of phasing out segregated workshops and group homes. Its employment targets, Hoopes said, are “woefully inadequate” and a “lost opportunity.” (...)

Sheltered workshops were designed after World War II to prepare people with disabilities for traditional employment. They caught on in Minnesota, and between 1970 and 1984 the sheltered workforce increased from 700 to 6,000 workers, including thousands of people who needed daily activities after the closing of state mental hospitals. Today, state policy perpetuates the segregation. (...)

From a taxpayer’s perspective, the workshop model is highly inefficient. It costs roughly $52,000 to create a sheltered workshop job that pays at least minimum wage, state records show. That’s nearly ten times the $5,300 it costs to help a disabled worker get a job in the community, according to a 2010 survey by the Department of Human Services. (...)

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photograph via