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[Back] [Email to a Friend] [Printer Friendly Version]Dane County Offers Choices; Costs Average Out
The Capital Times :: FRONT :: 4A
Saturday, December 11, 2004
By David Callender The Capital Times
Dane County's approach to employment services for adults with developmental
disabilities stresses community-based jobs, but also offers sheltered workshops
for some clients.About 70 percent of the county's 1,000 developmentally disabled clients work in jobs in the community, receiving support that ranges from job coaching to transportation assistance, says Human Services Department spokesman David Carlson.
The remaining 30 percent work in three sheltered workshop-type facilities.
The county's network of community-based support agencies has been in place for about 20 years. It's now large enough that the costs of both types of service are about the same: an average of $11,100 per person annually for sheltered workshop services and about $12,900 annually per person for community-based jobs.
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Carlson says the county tries to consider what type of work best serves the clients' needs, rather than the cost of services or the nature of a client's disability.
"We believe that the severity of a disability shouldn't dictate the setting somebody works in," he says.
"We don't look and say, So-and-so is going to cost a ton of money, so we won't' " provide a service, in part because with the large number of cases Dane County handles, the costs average out between high-need and low-need clients, Carlson says. Nor does the county put time limits on how long a client may receive job-coaching or other services.
While Dane County receives the bulk of its funding from the state/federal Medicaid program, it also spends millions from county tax revenues to provide a higher level of services, Carlson says.
"If we simply provided the level of services in the box that the state sets, there would be far less services to far fewer people," he says.
The new county budget, for instance, guarantees funding so that recent high school graduates can continue in the job programs they had in school. In some counties, new graduates have to wait to be placed in Medicaid-funded programs.
"When we in Dane County say we spend a lot more than any other county, it's true," Carlson says. "Because of that, we don't have a very long waiting list."
There are about 50 people waiting for employment services at any time, he adds. Most of those cases involve situations where a worker has received some services, but needs new ones.
"The classic case is a person who may have been getting help from his or her aging parents and now they're unable to provide that help," he says.
Others on the waiting list may also be those who have just moved to Dane County, he adds.
He says the county favors community-based employment over sheltered workshops for two reasons.
The first is philosophical, reflecting a longstanding commitment to community integration.
But the second is more practical.
"People in supported employment earned more than $2.5 million in wages in 2003," he says. "More than 90 percent of those employees earned the minimum wage or higher," while only 2 percent of those in sheltered workshops earned that much.
For those who are making more, "it gives them extra money to support a higher quality of life for them. They can spend more money and they can pay for things that the government can't provide."
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