By Joyce Scanlan, President

During the week of August 21-25, 2006, two representatives from the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) came to Minnesota to meet with state rehabilitation personnel of general rehab and State Services for the Blind (SSB), to tour private agencies such as Blindness: Learning in New Dimensions (BLIND), Inc. and other programs doing business with state rehab entities, and to confer with various rehabilitation councils, including the State Rehab Council for the Blind (SRC-B), and to meet with consumer organizations.  Here is what I said to them.

I am Joyce Scanlan, president, National Federation of the Blind of Minnesota.  We see our role as a consumer organization of blind people as providing advocacy for the blind population and serving as a watchdog to make sure that blind people of the state receive meaningful and relevant services of the highest quality.  We strongly believe that the agency providing services to blind people should be independent and separate from other programs with the autonomy to operate with direct communication with the state legislature and the governor and to receive funding directly without cumbersome layers of bureaucracy.  This structure would be most desirable for the provision of services to blind people.  While we do not have such a system in Minnesota, we do have a system in which our agency has separate identity with a moderate ability to govern itself; however, more importantly, the Federation has made its voice heard in the legislature, throughout state government, and—most important of all—within the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) itself.  We will go along with the unsatisfactory arrangement until we can persuade a responsive legislature and governor that blind people would benefit more if our rehab agency were free-standing and separate from the complex system of workforce centers that have no capacity for or interest in working with blind people.  The only reason we are welcomed into the DEED bureaucracy is that administrators can devise circuitous or sneaky ways to siphon off rehab funds to support the workforce center system.  And that's no joke.  It bears constant vigilance on our part.  Yet we do appreciate the degree of separate identity SSB has.  As we say in Minnesota: it could be worse.

We are pleased to have a director of SSB who understands fairness and open communication.  He meets with us whenever we ask him to and will discuss and give fair consideration to issues we bring to him.  He has a pretty good understanding of the training needs of blind people and has reintroduced a staff training program.  We all know that the academic programs providing training to rehab counselors deal very little with the matter of blindness; also, much of the academic information available to rehab students is often negative and not conducive to the development of a positive attitude toward blindness.  That SSB staff training is absolutely essential, and we hope the director will continue to work on improving it.

We are pleased that SSB has continued to support quality adjustment-to-blindness training and has improved its informed choice policy so that customers are encouraged to tour all training programs before making a decision based upon a more thorough understanding of what is available.  Rehab counselors must be urged to require customers to gather full information so that they won't be forced to rely solely on information provided by the counselor's often-biased opinions.

We do have a concern that too frequently the policies of DEED and SSB force blind people into low-level or entry-level jobs, rather than encouraging them to consider careers and preparing themselves for long-term employment.

SSB does not offer much more than information as its service to children.  Services provided to young children at the earliest age possible can save time for more adult services at an earlier age.  For instance, many children who are blind lose out on learning daily-living skills at an early age; SSB is in the best position to offer such training, but not much is available to young children until they reach 14 or later.

Also, although we realize that RSA may not be so concerned about such services, we are concerned that SSB doesn't offer more extensive services to seniors or older blind people.  We see older people being provided with written information, a tape player, or a closed circuit TV or some other equipment that may or may not work for them.  Seniors would benefit from and would maintain their independence longer if they were offered a more extensive adjustment-to-blindness training program.

Finally, I think the director has a pretty good understanding of the political landscape in which he works.  And we in the Federation understand it also.  So we work together quite well.