Providing outreach and rehabilitation counseling services to non-English speaking persons.

The Congressional findings concerning the programs authorized in Titles II through VIII of the Rehabilitation Act stated that "Patterns of inequitable treatment of minorities have been documented in all major junctures of the vocational rehabilitation process." The minority populations discussed in Section 21, entitled "Traditionally Underserved Populations," include Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans with disabilities. The inequitable treatment had been suspected for a long time, even as the rate of increase for these racial, ethnic, and cultural minorities was 10 times higher than for white Americans. The findings confirmed that vocational rehabilitation (VR) provides these minorities with less training than their white counterparts and that VR consistently spent less money on minorities.

One reason for the discrepancy, especially in the Latino or Asian-Americans with disabilities populations, is that often the client's primary language is one other than English. Outreach and counseling become considerably more difficult -- more difficult, but not impossible -- when aimed at non-English speaking individuals with disabilities. A bilingual staff, which the majority of rehabilitation agencies or office staffs fail to offer, goes a long way toward making outreach and vocational rehabilitation counseling meaningful for non-English speaking individuals with disabilities.

This article is offering the Congressional findings as a catalyst for vocational rehabilitation programs to step up their efforts in reaching out to and serving non-English speaking individuals with disabilities. This article shows how to design or improve outreach programs and then provide vocational counseling to a non-English speaking person with a disability.

Outreach

While the importance of having a bilingual staff is discussed below, it is equally important, and often a first step, that outreach efforts make the fact of the bilingual staff well known. Agencies and programs often cannot afford to duplicate posters, brochures, and business cards in other languages. When the money is tight and the program is providing those English materials, a simple proviso in at least one other language stating that the staff has bilingual capability (i.e., Se Habla Espanol) is easy and effective. Also, one should think about the liberal use of photographs and other graphics in posters and brochures where the text is mostly in English. Pictures are worth many words in any language.

When a program does develop materials in other languages, the staff should take care to assure that those materials are placed effectively and with cultural sensitivity Cultural community centers and English as a second language classes are among the places where outreach would be high. The staff should also stay in contact with those community service groups that regularly see non-English speaking clients. In Sacramento, California, rehabilitation staff members are often bumping into one another at the city's monthly Hispanic Resource Luncheon, where any organization can report on its services and progress to the other groups and also pass out literature in English and Spanish.

Along with expense problems, in California and many other states, VR outreach programs are being abolished or cut back simply because the field offices are already overwhelmed with consumers. This occurs while the population of people with disabilities continues to grow and, indeed, a 1993 U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) report stated that only a small fraction of people who are potentially eligible for services are actually served.

However, given the Congressional findings, many programs should be responsible for increasing efforts to reach out to the traditionally underserved populations. These efforts include:

* using public service announcements on the Spanish and Asian Language radio and television stations,

* holding scheduled orientation sessions in other languages, and

* making public presentations in other languages.

Any vocational rehabilitation agency or program that is serious about improving services to non-English-speaking clients must begin with an organized outreach plan that encompasses all or more of the above suggestions. The plan should not be placed solely on the shoulders of one person -- for example, the bilingual staff member -- but should be a cohesive teamwork effort to which all staff members are committed.

Counseling

The traditional role of the VR counselor is to help persons with disabilities maximize their personal and vocational potential. In order to make an effective assessment of an individual's capacity to live independently and work competitively, the counselor must evaluate the individual's condition as a whole. Certainly, the person's language skills and the specific language he/she speaks (or cannot speak) are parts of that condition, and, arguably, they are threshold issues to deal with in a rehabilitation context.

The types of information and/or issues which are most commonly important when assessing future work behavior and worklife are age, education (academic, vocational, on-the-job training, military service), marital status, financial status, transportation, military service, transferable skills, work experience, past promotional patterns, wage and salary information, nature of injury, residual functional capacities, emotional status, participation in vocational rehabilitation, and motivation (desire to work, willingness to move). Obviously, collecting this data and accurately assessing an individual's potential to benefit from vocational rehabilitation becomes much more difficult when that person does not speak English.

Upon determination that an individual's primary language is non-English, the entire focus of the rehabilitation counselor's assessment is altered. The counselor's efforts shift to the identification of available and appropriate resources. Absent resources which facilitate an evaluation of cognitive abilities, aptitudes, and interests, the counselor must rely more heavily upon techniques such as in-depth interviewing, transferable skills analysis, and client-initiated vocational exploration. Some of the most significant barriers faced by non-English speaking individuals with disabilities in California include:

* the absence of interpreter services,

* limited availability of vocational testing instruments in languages other than English,

* cultural insensitivity,

* insufficient bilingual work evaluation staff, and

* the absence of bilingual rehabilitation counseling staff.

The assessment of a non-English speaking individual's residual functional capacities can -- and in most assessment situations does -- become very unclear. A clear understanding by both the rehabilitation counselor and the client can only be reached through detailed discussions about that client's abilities to perform various activities. If the interviewing counselor, work evaluator, and/or test administrator are not fluent in the client's primary language, it then becomes very difficult to properly assess a client's strengths and weaknesses from a physical, intellectual and emotional perspective.

Although the use of an interpreter is a reasonable approach, it is at best a highly artificial process. The use of an interpreter may create as many barriers as it resolves; introducing a third party into what should be a very personal and spontaneous process may in many cases have the opposite effect. At the VR level, it is hoped that the Rehabilitation Act's 1992 requirement that the Commissioner develop a plan to prepare minorities for careers in vocational rehabilitation will result in more bilingual and cultural-sensitive counselors. Also, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires state agencies to make their services "equally effective" for their consumers with disabilities. Having caseworkers who can communicate directly with their clients or consumers is one of the examples that the ADA regulations cite to illustrate how services for persons with disabilities must be as effective as those for nondisabled persons.

Finally, there are several cultural issues that can have a dramatic effect on the ultimate outcome of the rehabilitation program. Issues such as the family support system and social perceptions regarding personal capabilities of individuals with disabilities are examples of the types of potential problem areas to which rehabilitation counselors must be sensitive.

In short, the primary issues that non-English speaking individuals with disabilities face when attempting to participate in vocational rehabilitation are not the usual decision points -- such as choosing a vocational objective, selecting appropriate training or education facilities, or obtaining adaptive equipment -- but rather involve having access to qualified, bilingual rehabilitation counseling staff sensitive to the cultural needs of specific clients and knowledgeable about available community resources. Non-English speaking individuals must be greeted by rehabilitation counselors with something other than, "Come back when you can speak English."

In conclusion, there is a clear need for VR agencies to develop and implement meaningful outreach programs for non-English speaking individuals with disabilities. While the development and implementation of outreach programs is expensive in terms of both time and funds, these programs would be rendered useless without a careful structured framework in place to address this challenge meaningfully. Careful and sensitive consideration must be given to methodology. Sporadic, unstructured, diffused, and varied approaches towards implementing an outreach and services delivery system will only perpetuate the status quo. The continuation of inadequate and inappropriate service delivery systems, or even worse, lack of access to those systems, would only lead to unsuccessful out comes for the underserved populations.

Bibliography

[1.] Rehabilitation Services Administrator (1992). Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Washington DC: U.S. Department of Education.

[2.] Vocational Rehabilitation: Evidence for Federal Program's Effectiveness is Mixed (1993). U.S. Government Accounting Office, Washington: DC.

[3.] Americans with Disabilities Act (1993). 28 C.F.R. 35694, 42 U.S.C. Sections 1201 et seq. Washington: DC.

Mr. O'Brien is a certified rehabilitation counselor with 14 years experience currently in private practice. Mr. Rhoades is directing attorney of the Disability Rights Program of Legal Services of Northern California, Sacramento.