The Rehabilitation System Today

There are more than fifty million people with disabilities in the United States, making them the largest minority group in the country. To serve this large group of people, each state and territory of the U.S. has its own vocational rehabilitation agency in local government, working in partnership with the Rehabilitation Service Administration (RSA). Instead of supervising and controlling the agencies, RSA advises the state agencies about the national governments official policies towards rehabilitation.

This "public rehabilitation system" is extremely large. Each year it supports approximately 800,000 people with disabilities to live independently and find jobs. The system includes more than 8,000 community rehabilitation provider agencies, which employ approximately 160,000 staff. RSA divides these agencies across the U.S. into ten regions. In each region, RSA supervises and helps fund the state VR systems. RSA supplies two and a half billion dollars ($2,500,000,000) in federal tax money to the state and local agencies. The individual states provide one billion more dollars, and various other federal agencies supply funds for particular situations (mental retardation, blindness, and special education, among others). Some administrators estimate that rehabilitation is a thirty billion-dollar industry in the United States.

In a typical rehabilitation provider organization, the different staff positions have different levels of training. Many staff members have jobs that require either national certification or state licensure, including the VR counselors, vocational evaluation staff, and physical or occupational therapists. But more than three-fourths of these staff members hold jobs that have no official preparation or testing, including job coaches, housing staff, and independent living specialists. Individual provider agencies and organizations hire thousands of new direct service staff every year. Often these new staff members have no experience with rehabilitation or with people with disabilities. The agencies train them in various ways, but there is no standard training.

Changing to person centered values has meant convincing all VR staff members to abandon the historic role of "powerful", "benevolent" providers. The most recent additions to the Rehabilitation Act require a "Comprehensive System of Personnel Development" (CSPD) for all staff members to familiarize them with supporting person centered values and the new principles of the public rehabilitation system. Unfortunately, there are no accepted standards or content for this personnel development for most staff positions.

In each RSA region, a Rehabilitation Continuing Education Program office (RCEP) provides different kinds of training for the staff of the service provider agencies in that region. The Region VII RCEP office, serving Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, developed this orientation to meet the need for a basic introduction to rehabilitation and person centered values. We hope that this information will suggest ways you can support person centered values as you carry out your job in the rehabilitation system.

Now you are familiar with person centered values and why they are important to everyone working for the public rehabilitation system. In the next section of this orientation you will read about how these values have been used in some real situations.

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