Developmentally Disabled, Unable to Speak ... Ready to Work?

Some months ago, Ron Davids noticed that Robbie Keys liked to open car doors. Keys—a tall, dark-haired 47-year-old who moves quickly but with stooped shoulders—is developmentally disabled, or what used to be known as mentally retarded. Except for the occasional exclamation—often "Hot!"—he doesn't speak, and can't easily communicate his likes and dislikes. According to his parents, he spends most of his time walking around, gazing out windows. So when Keys grabbed a key ring and opened the door of Davids' white Honda Accord one day, Davids saw it as a clue. "I sensed he was a tool user," Davids says. He thought he could work with that.

Davids, a loquacious, grey-haired former pastor, is on the front line of a 3-year-old state policy that encourages all developmentally disabled people to find paid employment—no matter how profound their disabilities. As an employment consultant for a Bellevue organization called AtWork!, Davids' task is to identify skills in people who were long thought to have none, and to match those skills with jobs in the real world. Keys is one of the most challenging people on Davids' caseload, but because of the epiphany about tools, he says, "there's a chance." Maybe Keys could assemble something—at some point way down the road. For now, Davids has to see if he is right about Keys' mechanical inclination.

One recent Tuesday, Davids picks Keys up at the Bellevue group home where he lives and takes him to the AtWork! offices. On a conference-room table, Davids sets down a small, crude wooden box, and Keys fingers it like a foreign object, making his typical guttural noises.

"You can't open it with your hands," Davids says, and he holds up a screwdriver. Keys grabs the tool and immediately inserts it into one of the screws that holds the box together.

"OK, that's making it tighter," Davids says. Keys continues regardless.

"Robbie, stop—go the other way," Davids says. Instead, Keys puts the screwdriver down and starts twisting the screw with his hand. When that doesn't work, he tries the screwdriver again.

"Go the other way. Go the other way, please. Stop!" Davids says. Finally, Keys does. The screw pops out.

"All right!" Davids exclaims. "Got one." Keys sits back and puts his hand on his chin.

"Hmmm," Davids says, "can you go for two?" Keys does, and then tries another and another, but he periodically gets frustrated and stops. He rubs his eyes. He stretches his foot underneath the table and taps Davids'. As if preparing to leave, he puts his arms in the jacket he's brought (despite the 80-degree heat).

"We can go to the car when we're finished with the box," Davids says.

Keys works with several more screws, but keeps reaching for his jacket. Finally, with Davids still urging him on, he abruptly stands up, puts on his jacket, and shoots out the door.

"So, it looks like I'm taking Robbie back," Davids says. The activity has lasted about 20 minutes.

"It's a noble effort," says Robert Keys Sr., reflecting on Davids' work with his son. He notes that Robbie used to split firewood and feed pigs and cows on the multi-acre Whidbey Island plot where he grew up—when he wasn't jumping into a bulldozer or car and wreaking havoc. In recent years, though, his father says, he can't get him to do anything. Robbie's mother suspects her son may be prematurely aging, as people with developmental disabilities sometimes do. For whatever reason, his attention span is limited to a few minutes. "It'd be a miracle if they could find anything that he could do [for work]," Keys Sr. says.

The government officials who pay for services like Davids' don't see it as a miracle, exactly. They see it more as a civil right. "Everyone in the U.S. should have the opportunity to work and make a real wage," says Ray Jensen, director of King County's Developmental Disabilities Division, which doles out state money to individuals to fund their employment training. He and others in the field are trying to change the focus from what developmentally disabled people can't do to what they can. It's part of the broader movement of "inclusion," which aims to take developmentally disabled people out of segregated facilities—historically prone to instances of abuse, and lacking role models—and integrate them into regular community settings.

The state's Department of Social and Health Services intensified this effort three years ago when it decided that all the activities it funded for developmentally disabled adults under age 62 would be related to finding and keeping jobs. Previously, the state had offered a recreational program as well, which involved activities like swimming, bowling, art classes, and outings to the mall.

Priority was also placed on jobs in the real world, as opposed to so-called "sheltered workshops." Often run by nonprofits, these workshops pay developmentally disabled people nominal salaries (most recently, an average of $2.20 an hour) to do rote assembly and other tasks for various companies. Although the state continues to fund support staff for sheltered workshops, social-service agencies that work with the developmentally disabled have gotten the state's message and are phasing these facilities out. Their focus now is on finding their clients jobs in places like Fred Meyer, Starbucks, and PETCO.