This is the second in a four part series on the challenges that young people with special needs face as they transition from school into adulthood. To read the first part, click here.
Marion Ciarlo estimates that her 26-year-old son Alex has had ten caseworkers over the decade that he’s been connected with the Bureau of Rehabilitation Services, the state agency responsible for helping young people with disabilities find employment. She’s been asked to fill out paperwork that she’s already completed. And she said the wait times for a response — even to an email — is at least two weeks.
“Bottom line is, all they do is push paper, because, from the minute we started working together — ‘Fill out this form, fill out this form, sign this form, take this online assessment, do this, do that,’” said Ciarlo.
As a teen, Alex, who is neurodivergent, went through the Level Up Program, which provides vocational counseling and internships to people between the ages of 16 and 21 with disabilities. Ciarlo said he was placed at one point in a library, and then at BJs, but only for a few weeks at each site.
“No formalized plan. No structure,” she told CT Examiner.
Eventually, Ciarlo said, she managed to get Alex a job with the City of Waterbury. But the job didn’t work out, and Alex resigned in March 2024.
“Now he’s just been kind of floundering,” she said.
Ciarlo’s complaints — about long wait times for appointments, high turnover among job counselors and a mismatch between what the agency offered and the jobs their children were able, or willing, to do — were echoed by multiple parents who spoke to CT Examiner about their own experiences with the Bureau of Rehabilitation Services.
The process of finding a job for young people with disabilities in Connecticut is a significant challenge. It’s one of a large number of tasks that parents and young adults have to grapple with as a result of what has been dubbed the “special education cliff” — the abrupt moment when, at the age of 22, a young person exits the school system and becomes eligible for adult services.
“I see how we educate students with disabilities in our schools, and then the minute they graduate, we just drop them off a cliff,” said Ciarlo. “We drop them off a cliff, because there’s no support services.”
It’s an experience that parents, nonprofit providers and experts have described as overwhelming and under-resourced.
“It’s really a kind of a scary time for families,” said Karen Helene, the director of Benhaven, a private nonprofit school and career transition program for young people with autism and developmental disabilities. “You have all these entitlements as a student and then it just all dries up overnight.”
The cliff has a variety of dropping-off points, depending on the person’s needs, their abilities and the services that are available for them. For young people with autism or an intellectual disability who are considered “higher functioning” — capable of working a job if they are given certain accommodations — the difficulty lies in gaining the necessary skills to function in the job market, and then finding an employer willing to offer them work.
For many of these young people, the only state support offered for that job training and placement lies in the state’s Bureau of Rehabilitation Services. But the agency’s resources are nowhere near being able to cope with the level of need.
Dave Doukas, the Bureau’s director, told CT Examiner that the agency has suffered from “a tremendous amount of attrition” in its staffing.
“It’s not a surprise to me at all that some kids have not gotten services that the parents had hoped for or that we had hoped to deliver. There definitely are some holes,” he said.
“The deck is stacked against us”
Doukas said the state agency has historically had funding for only 11 counselors to work in pre-vocational services with all the high schools in Connecticut (They have recently increased the number to 15).
Doukas told CT Examiner that his staff can realistically work with about 2,500 students between the ages of 16 and 21 each year. But, he said, there are over 16,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 21 who would qualify for services from the agency.
Even with a coming increase in staffing, the maximum number of students the agency will be able to serve at once will peak at 3,800. Doukas said that in order to meet their goal of working with every student two years before their graduation date, the agency’s staff and its funding for additional services would need to more than double.
“The deck is kind of stacked against us in terms of reaching everybody potentially eligible, because we just don’t have the manpower to do that,” he said.
Adding to that problem, he said, is the wave of mass retirements that happened in the state government in 2022, driven by a change to the pension system. He said that since it takes 2-3 years to train a vocational counselor, the agency is still in the middle of onboarding and training a large number of their staff.
Under a state law that passed in 2023, Doukas said, his agency will receive funding to add on some new positions. But even with that, he said, the agency will only be able to reach about a quarter of the students graduating from high school within two years who are eligible for their services.
According to data from BRS, the number of young people with open cases has risen from 5,000 in 2021 to nearly 6,000 this year, with a 13 percent increase in new applicants.
But at the same time, the number of young people who have successfully found employment and kept it for 90 days decreased from 62 percent in 2022 to 56 percent in 2024 — a number that the agency claims is “a lagging indicator” from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Doukas also confirmed that BRS staff had been working remotely since the pandemic, saying that they were under the state employee collective bargaining agreement, which only requires workers to be in-person one day a week.
Another problem, Doukas said, is that even when people apply to work for the agency, they don’t always have the necessary qualifications, which includes specific instruction on working with people who have disabilities in an employment setting.
“Master’s degree programs are not really churning out these individuals with the rate that they once were, and people are choosing other options as opposed to public employment,” said Doukas. “So it’s made recruitment tough and has delayed our getting our feet back underneath us.”
Struggling to find, and keep, a job
Karen Linder said her 26-year-old son, who is on the autism spectrum, started working with the Bureau a decade ago. Through the agency, he got a few summer job placements during his high school years. After he graduated, the agency connected him with a small company that manufactured campaign buttons. Linder said he enjoyed that job, but when the pandemic hit, the company shut down, and they didn’t hire him back when they reopened.
Since then, he’s had two other stints, one in retail and one at a Stop and Shop — which lasted only a single day, when, for reasons that Linder says are still unclear, the job coach the agency was supposed to send to help him adapt to the job never arrived. Her son had a panic attack, she said, and left the store.
Linder said that each time her son has gotten a placement through the Bureau, it’s taken six months to secure it, and that he’s only been able to get part-time positions — although that, she said, is not entirely the fault of the Bureau. Her son has limitations in where he can work; he can’t drive on highways, so any employment needs to be close to where they live, and he wants to work in a job where he doesn’t have to interact with customers.
She said he’s been working with a BRS counselor for at least six months trying to find a job that would give him more hours.
The Bureau contracts out with several providers in different parts of the state to help with job placement, interview prep, job coaching and transition services.
Shannon McCann, the Chief Operating Officer of Southeastern Employment Services, one of the agencies that contracts with BRS to provide employment coaches, told CT Examiner that job coaching was an extremely difficult job, and that it was hard to find people who were willing to work for the pay rates that her agency was able to offer.
“You never know what you’re going to be tasked with,” said McCann. “It’s complex and it’s challenging.”
The number of agencies in the state providing these services has also dropped significantly, furthered along by the pandemic. This has put more pressure on the surviving agencies like McCann’s.
“The pandemic was very, very hard on our provider community that we contract with,” said Doukas. “Their ranks have been decimated. There’s a lot of attrition, a lot of turnover. Some providers have closed their doors … their capacity to take on cases is compromised at this point.”
McCann noted that her agency had about 20 job coaches who were responsible for close to 200 cases across the Eastern half of the state. She said the job includes a lot of driving, and that the pay they were able to offer wasn’t much more than what someone would make at a fast-food restaurant.
“A lot of people start, and then when they find out really what the job is and how hard it is, and then they look at what they’re getting paid, they leave,” said McCann. “We’ve had a lot of people leave. We’ve asked some people to leave because they’re not right for the job. It’s hard, but we do our best.”
“He’s stagnating”
Meanwhile, the wait for services causes other problems for families. Linder and other parents said that leaving their children without employment for a long period of time erodes their stamina.
“Basically, this means he’s sitting at home. He’s stagnating. He has nothing to do,” said Linder. “So any bandwidth and skills that he built up about going into the job and being able to physically attend to something for six hours a day all regressed.”
Gillian Stein, whose son, Daniel, is diagnosed with autism, expressed the same concerns. Her son is obsessed with computers, and his goal was to work in Information Technology. She said that Daniel fell in a “gray area” — ineligible for services through DDS, but not able to go out on his own and get a job.
Despite having received multiple certifications through a program called LaunchIT, which the Bureau set him up with, Daniel has not been able to find work since completing a paid internship through the Bureau last September.
“Delays in this sort of thing is heartbreaking, because you’re like, ‘Geez, will he even be able to get back into it, and is it appropriate to even look for full time [work] if he can’t do it?’ Because obviously you don’t want to set them up for failure,” she said.
Stein said that it’s been difficult to get employers to hire someone like Daniel, who does not have a college degree.
“The barrier is to now find an IT position that’s willing to take a chance on someone who doesn’t immediately appear like they’ve got it all together,” she said.
Kari Sassu, director of strategic initiatives for the Center of Excellence on Autism Spectrum Disorders at Southern Connecticut State University, said that research demonstrates that people with autism but with no intellectual disabilities have the highest unemployment levels of any disability category.
“Individuals with an intellectual disability actually fare better in terms of employment than individuals who might have, you know, an [IQ score of 130], but they have autism,” said Sassu.
The reason, she said, is because individuals with autism tend to have “spiky skills” — they are extremely competent in some areas, but have serious challenges with “soft skills” like interviewing.
Kassidy Brown, CEO of The Lighthouse in East Lyme, a nonprofit that offers day programs, vocational skills and special education placement, said that, in his experience, the challenge was less about the actual job and more about soft skills.
“A lot of people that we are talking about have challenges with social skills or the unwritten rules of a job or all these different things. So they can get a job, but they have a hard time keeping a job. And so a lot of the other people, it’s about the hygiene and dressing for the job and presenting professionally and doing all those different things that take a lot more intensive support.”
“He was never late”
Doukas said the Bureau has been making some changes using new grants from the federal government. It now has an equal number of pre-employment job counselors and adult counselors, with the goal of shifting young people directly from youth employment programs to adult programs. Additionally, he said, the agency is using a grant to fund a program to divert young people from sub-minimum wage jobs, and to pilot a curriculum for middle-schoolers.
He said the Bureau was also piloting an expansion of its policy to make it easier for young people to access four-year college, and that they were working to connect young people with more workforce training options through the Department of Labor.
But funding isn’t consistent. While Doukas has been able to obtain $65 million in extra funds from the federal government over the last 15 years, he said the amount he gets is dependent on what the federal government makes available. Last year, he said, he’d received only about a quarter of what he requested.
And the need is always there. According to data from the bureau, the number of pre-working age young people in the Level Up program has increased from 470 in 2022 to 620 in 2023, and will most likely pass that count this year.
Another mother, Jennifer, who asked that her last name not be used to respect her son’s privacy, said that the agency worked with her son on his interviewing skills and communication skills, and that through the Level Up program, her son landed a job at CVS one summer, where he worked 80 hours. She said he enjoyed the job.
But she also said she would have liked to see greater variety in the types of job experiences they could offer — a problem that she sees as coming less from the Bureau and more from larger limitations in the workforce.
“I wish that more people, more companies, more businesses —more people in the community, even — would open their opportunities for some of these kids, because, let me tell you, he was never late. He’s a hard worker. He never didn’t show up. He did whatever he was told to do,” Jennifer said.