[Home-on-the-range] KCStar: AlphaPointe Helps When Your Sight is Going But You Want to Keep Working

Stanzel, Susan - FSA, Kansas City, MO Susan.Stanzel at kcc.usda.gov
Fri Jan 11 12:43:40 UTC 2013


Good morning everyone,

Susan, thanks for sharing this article. I am taking it to the Johnson County meeting this evening to have it read. I am at least happy the NFB was mentioned. I thought it really homed in on the problems of blindness.
Susie

From: Home-on-the-range [mailto:home-on-the-range-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Susan Tabor
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2013 12:16 AM
To: NFB of Kansas Internet Mailing List
Subject: [Home-on-the-range] KCStar: AlphaPointe Helps When Your Sight is Going But You Want to Keep Working

Thought this would be of interest on a number of levels.—Susan


Kansas city business
The Kansas City Star


Alphapointe helps when your sight is going but you want to keep working

JOHN SLEEZER
Rochelle Blount, a lead investigator in the call center at Alphapointe, 7501 Prospect, on Thursday, December 13, 2012, in Kansas City, Mo. Blount has Glaucoma, along with Cone Distrophy. Alphapointe provides retraining for workers who lose their vision and also hires employees disabilities. John Sleezer/The Kansas City Star
JOHN SLEEZER Joyce Smith, an assistant shift supervisor at Alphapointe, 7501 Prospect, uses a video camera that delivers a magnified picture to her computer so she can see around the office area on Thursday, December 13, 2012, in Kansas City, Mo. Smith has limited vision due to macro degeneration. Alphapointe provides retraining for workers who lose their vision and also hires employees with disabilities. John Sleezer/The Kansas City Star
‹ ›
Visual impairment among Americans
• 20.5 million age 40 and older have cataracts.
• 5.3 million age 18 and older have diabetic retinopathy.
• 3.4 million age 40 and older are legally blind or visually impaired.
• 2.2 million age 40 and older have glaucoma.
• 1.6 million age 50 and older have macular degeneration.
Source: Centers for Disease Control
Vocational resources for sight-impaired persons
Alphapointe
www.alphapointe.org<http://www.alphapointe.org>
816-421-5848
On the Kansas side of the Kansas City area
Kansas Department for Children and Families, office of rehabilitation and employment services
www.dcf.ks.gov/services<http://www.dcf.ks.gov/services>
913-279-7407
On the Missouri side of the Kansas City area:
Missouri Department of Social Services, Family Support Division, office of rehabilitation services for the blind
dss.mo.gov/fsd/rsb/
816-889-2677, north of the Missouri River; 816-929-7171, south of the river
Rehabilitation Institute of Kansas City
www.rehabkc.org<http://www.rehabkc.org>
816-751-7700; 800-726-3713 (employment services)
National Federation of the Blind
https://nfb.org/working
410-659-9314
More attention needed
• By 2030, the number of blind and visually impaired people is expected to double.
• Only half of the estimated 61 million U.S. adults who are at high risk for serious vision loss have visited an eye doctor in the last 12 months.
Source: Centers for Disease Control

January 7, 2013

By DIANE STAFFORD
The Kansas City Star

Joyce Smith and Rochelle Blount were nurses. Health care was a career they loved.
Then glaucoma stole much of Smith’s vision. Glaucoma and cone dystrophy damaged Blount’s sight.
Neither could continue in the jobs they had. Each tried to do some home health nursing, but limited sight and inability to drive to their clients made even that impossible.
But what could have been the ends of their work lives turned into beginnings.
Blount, 47, now has a lead position in a call center. Smith, 51, is an assistant manager for an office products department.
Both use technology that helps them do responsible desk jobs, thanks to job retraining through Alphapointe, a Kansas City-based agency that provides rehabilitation and occupational services for people with vision loss.
“I tried working at a grocery store,” Blount said. “I tried being a Wal-Mart door greeter. I could do those jobs, but they weren’t stimulating enough for me.”
And that’s a work issue encountered many times over as the big baby boom generation grows older and develops disabilities related to illness or age. Like Smith and Blount, millions more Americans each year are becoming visually impaired or blind.
Many can’t continue to do the same jobs they’ve been doing. Filing for Social Security disability is an option, but not one that many prefer, not for financial or professional fulfillment reasons.
Another option, a sheltered workshop, has long existed for people who are blind or have low vision and have some kind of developmental disability. Newly affected professionals require a different work solution.
That solution, for many, depends on what kind of job they want to continue — or start — and whether an employer will take a chance on them.
It’s a big if. Advocates for the sight-impaired say employers too often are reluctant to take that chance.
“Employers don’t always know how relatively inexpensive the adaptive technology, the accommodations, are,” said Clay Berry, Alphapointe’s director of education and rehabilitation.
“They want to know how the person will do the tasks. They ask about safety, coming from the perception that people with visual impairments are more likely to have accidents in the workplace. They want to know about transportation. And even if they don’t typically ask about health and attendance, you can tell it’s on their minds.”
The economic reality is that employers want to make sure that people with vision disabilities can keep productive pace with sighted peers. Given doubts, they’re not likely to take a chance.
David Westbrook, who lost his functional eyesight as a teenager, said the reluctance is unfortunate.
“A desk worker with today’s technology in most cases can continue to process and share information,” he said. “It’s not the absence of technology that’s a problem. Its cost is reasonable, and as long as the corporate culture is respectful, there are few reasons why” accommodating low-vision employees can’t work.
Westbrook, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Children’s Mercy Hospital, said that if workers who are losing their vision can’t stay in the jobs they have, there sometimes is “self segregation” to work environments such as Alphapointe.
That’s the choice made by Smith and Blount. And they consider it a happy solution, given that the alternative might have been unemployment.
“I used to help ex-offenders find jobs, and I’ll tell you, it was easier to place a pedophile than a blind person,” said Christine McDonald, who formerly worked for an agency that helped people with vision impairments. She said that with a laugh but wasn’t truly joking.
The agency where she worked shut down last year, and McDonald, herself blind, was thrust back into the job market with no illusions about how difficult re-employment would be.
“It’s insanely hard to place the sight-impaired in the private sector,” McDonald said. “Society has crazy preconceived notions about what blind persons can or can’t do. Employers are more inclined to doubt the ability or say, ‘Oh, she’s blind. This has to be a safety hazard, a liability.’ ”
Attacking that reluctance is job one for organizations such as Alphapointe locally and the National Federation of the Blind nationally. Front and center on the federation’s Web page it says:
“The real problem of blindness is not the loss of eyesight. The real problem is the misunderstanding and lack of information that exist. If a blind person has proper training and opportunity, blindness can be reduced to a physical nuisance.”
McDonald, who had both eyes removed because of a viral disease, said, “There’s an elephant in the room when a sight-impaired person goes on an interview. … People have so many fears, so many questions, but they either can’t ask or are afraid to ask.”
Her remedy is to take her laptop computer with its assistive technology along on interviews and say, “I know you’re concerned about my ability to handle the job. Let me show you how I can do it.”
She said she knows not to expect any favors.
“Especially if the economy is iffy, the risk is huge for taking on someone with sight impairment who might not be able to make productivity goals,” McDonald said. “If you want to work in mainstream society, you have to keep up the pace that a sighted person would.”
Some of the technology that could make productivity possible can be acquired for free by working through the network of government or foundation-funded rehabilitation services. Individuals, as well as employers, may be eligible for such assistance.
Even if not government-subsidized, the “typical” cost is about $500 to provide devices or job restructuring that helps a person with a disability handle the demands of the job, according to the Job Accommodation Network, a national organization.
Unfortunately, Berry said, agencies such as Alphapointe “don’t typically engage with folks until after it’s too late to save their jobs” by helping with disability accommodations.
“So we’re starting from scratch,” Berry said. “They’ve lost the jobs they had. They walk into our door without an idea of what they want to do. So we go through a process, looking at their skills, interests, personality, and they tend to go toward where their interests and talent align.”
Chris Montavon was in the position of not knowing what to do next after he lost his job as a slot attendant at the casino where he’d worked for eight years.
But Montavon had the good fortune to cash his severance check with a bank teller who told him to call Alphapointe. The chance conversation led him to a new work life after retinitis pigmentosa began to narrow his field of vision.
Today, the 31-year-old man is a quality assurance technician at Alphapointe, where he initially signed up to learn how to navigate the world as someone who is legally blind.
“I didn’t want to wake up with no vision one morning and not be prepared,” he said.
After about six months of training in life and vocational skills, Montavon took a job as a retail clerk, but he was hungry for something more. By his own admission, he pestered Alphapointe to put him on staff.
“This is more challenging, more fulfilling. This is an important job,” Montavon said of the job he now holds in Alphapointe’s manufacturing division.
His new business card identifies him — in type and Braille — as an advocate in national networks for people with disabilities.
One of his biggest advocacy projects has been to encourage improved Share-a-Fare service, the “para-transit” transportation used by people with disabilities when city bus routes don’t fit their needs and regular cabs are too expensive.
“Transportation is a disaster,” Berry said of sight-impaired workers’ ability, in general, to get to jobs.
“All the jobs we hear about in Lenexa and Overland Park are not an option if you live in midtown Kansas City. You hear about new jobs at the old Indian Springs shopping mall. You can’t get there. The state line issue is huge. North of the river, south of the river is huge,” Berry said.
“We have folks who are forced to move to get the job they want. So we generally counsel people to live along bus lines. But those schedules are challenges. They don’t fit with overnight call center schedules, for example, so unless you have a friends-and-family network, you can’t get to the job you could do.”
In the Kansas City area there are few organized transportation options, and those that exist are at capacity. In Olathe, for example, there’s a service that provides transportation for Olathe residents to jobs within Olathe, but it’s not accepting any more applications now, its Web site says.
And, quite frankly, Berry said, there’s another disincentive for re-employment besides transportation difficulties: Blind and low-vision people may get more income staying home than working.
In Missouri, for example, there’s a blind pension of $707 a month that can be taken on top of other entitlements.
“Vision has higher allowable earnings before you lose your disability benefits than other disabilities,” Berry said. “Folks can work part time, get Social Security and have a blind pension plus have access to the Medicaid program. In some cases, the math is easy to decide what to do.”
Still, many workers with sight disabilities, especially those in professions they want to continue to pursue, would like to stay in the game.
To reach Diane Stafford call 816-234-4359 or send email to stafford at kcstar.com<mailto:stafford at kcstar.com>.


Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/01/07/3999153/when-your-sight-is-going-but-you.html?story_link=email_msg#storylink=cpy






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