Hard Landings by Cammie McGovern

Author:Cammie McGovern [McGovern, Cammie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

At each site I visited, I started out thinking, Ethan probably couldn’t do this. But by the end of the day, I’d met one or two workers who reminded me enough of him that I changed my mind. Maybe he could, I thought, over and over. Maybe he could. Every employee working an inventory scanner and steering a U-boat down a hallway paves the way for many more.

For parents who’ve trained themselves to narrow their dreams to a handful of possibilities that seem realistic, it’s a thrill to add half a dozen jobs to the list. But for most of us, there is still a long road ahead. In our area, we have no Blue Star and no Rising Tide. Even Project SEARCH, which has satellite programs in almost every state, doesn’t yet have one in Western Massachusetts. Does this mean every parent of a child with IDD will need to be a budding entrepreneur to ensure a productive life for their son or daughter? Hopefully not—though I suspect for the time being, they will need to be a fighter. When I return from my travels, I’m heartened to discover that an old friend from Ethan’s preschool days, David, who also has autism, has been working for almost a year doing electronic recycling in Fairfax, Virginia, for a company that worked primarily on government contracts. I call his mother, Jenny Koprowski, to find out more. She tells me he loves the work and his team, but about a year after they started, the whole workforce was laid off due to a change in the federal policy on hiring protocols. For six weeks, the team has been attending a day program as their parents fight to get their contract reinstated. “All they do is sit at desks, miserable,” she tells me. “They just want to get back to work.” With the help of local legislators, Jenny and her husband, Dan, have put a bill before the Virginia General Assembly that will include language in government contracts favoring companies that hire people with disabilities. As the largest single employer in the country, this feels like a commonsense way the government can help.

“The first job David and his team did when they started this work was taking apart all of Maryland’s old voting machines,” Jenny tells me. “There were thousands of them and they all had to be unscrewed and broken down, piece by piece. The government has tons of work like this and these people could be their best employees to do it. They just have to give them some preference in hiring because these aren’t guys who are going to do great in interviews.”

Later she sends me a video clip of David wearing headphones and working with the same fierce concentration as the employees I saw at Blue Star. Jenny was a powerful advocate back before our children even started kindergarten. In the days when I could hardly bring myself to tell anyone about Ethan’s diagnosis, she wore T-shirts emblazoned autism mom.

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