Writing in the [UK] Guardian, Janet Murray says the UK needs to provide more options for young adults with learning disabilities after they finish school.

Too many of these young people find themselves stifled by inappropriate adult day care centers that do nothing to help them gain skills and independence, she says. Less than five percent of them find employment.

The government has promised to provide funding to support young adults in their quest for jobs, Murray says, but employers are reluctant to hire them.

The Hartford Courant compares the Vista Vocational & Life Skills Center in Westbrook with a college or university. It helps students improve their life skills, build self esteem, develop friendships, and become involved in work and volunteering.

But there’s a key difference: Vista’s students have cognitive or intellectual disabilities.

An excerpt:

“We call it a life skills college,” said Vista executive director Helen Bosch. “If you imagine a university and people having to make a choice about where they are going after high school, for people with disabilities, we are like a university after high school.”

Bosch says many Vista students go on to be completely self-sufficient.

(Hartford Courant photo. Student Alyssa Earwaker lives in an apartment and takes vocational and life skills classes.)

Writing in the Washington Post, novelist Ann Bauer (no relation) says she’s jealous of parents whose adult children have Down syndrome.

Bauer, whose son has autism, says family members of people with Down syndrome have “figured out a cohesive, workable system of support,” while the autism community is divided and disorganized.

She wishes the autism community could take a lesson in cooperation from families of people with Down syndrome, but fears that high rates of selective termination will ensure that “the power of their parent group is shrinking, as is the world’s mosaic of human form.”

Someone has to talk to those wise parents before they die out, or I fear our children with autism will continue to wander through a world where they never fit.

Lots of graduation stories with a disability angle this weekend. Here’s a sampling:

• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer: First four students graduate from community college life skills program. The degree was designed especially for people with intellectual disabilities, with the goal of helping them become self-sufficient.
• The [Minneapolis-St. Paul] Star Tribune: A journey to better things (autism). Family celebrates the graduation of son with autism who was adopted from Romania.
• The New Hampshire Union Leader: John Clayton: From Special Olympics to autism studies at Yale. Valedictorian who volunteers at Special Olympics plans to attend Yale to study molecular biology and seek the root causes for autism.
• The [Cincinnati] Enquirer: Fitting in was hardest lesson (Asperger’s)
• The Miami Herald: Deaf high school students graduate with pride
• The St. Petersburg [Florida] Times: Student with Down syndrome a part of graduating class
• The Cape Cod Times: Riverview School honors 62 students (learning disabilities — photo above)
• The [Los Angeles] Daily News: Autistic graduates cap off a remarkable comeback

Other graduation stories here.

From the Washington Post:

Some 100 students with disabilities danced the night away in a donated ballroom at Washington’s historic Willard Hotel at their prom, the “Cinderella Ball.” The students raised about $100,000 to stage the annual event, which was launched just three years ago in a warehouse in Woodbridge, Virginia.

No one noticed the occasional meltdown, when the loud music or crowd became a little too much. It didn’t matter that some students needed help feeding themselves. Couples held hands. Wheelchairs twirled. “I think the disabilities disappear when they are all together,” said Kim Cockrell, whose daughter Cari has Down syndrome.

From the New York Times, a feature on 20-year-old Sam Stabiner, who lives among elderly people in a Manhattan nursing home. His parents would like him to live among people his own age, but could not find a place for young adults that could provide appropriate care for Sam’s complex medical needs.

As medical advances have allowed patients who might have died as children to survive into adulthood, the patients are falling into a void in a health care system that has yet to develop institutions for the young and “medically fragile.”

… about 8,000 people under age 30 are among roughly 1.4 million nursing home residents, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“This is a problem that has gone largely unrecognized and is only going to grow,” said Dr. Edwin F. Simpser, the chief medical officer at St. Mary’s Healthcare System for Children, the largest provider of intensive rehabilitation and specialized care for severely ill and disabled children in New York.

Son qualifies, but Missouri has no money for services

St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan writes again about Richard and Donna Schnurman, who are trying to get adult services for their son Brent. Despite the assistance of a state representative, the Schnurmans are caught on a “journey into the rabbit hole of the Missouri mental health system where nothing is quite as it seems.”

After many phone calls, the Schnurmans get some good news: Brent qualifies for “crisis” services under Medicaid waivers. But there is also bad news: he won’t receive the services because funds are not available.

Another parent tells McClellan he was in a similar situation and successfully sued for the Medicaid services. “I’ve been lied to so many times I don’t trust anybody in state government. The Department of Mental Health should be my son’s advocate, not his adversary,” he says.

Meanwhile, the Schnurmans are tired, and desperate for help. “It does not speak well of Missouri that we have no help to give,” McClellan writes.

Earlier column here.