Lack of Recruits Could Spell End of Corps : Program for Mentally Disabled in a Strange Struggle for Survival

POWAY â€”  The eye of the hurricane is at Lake Poway. On the far side, in the bush. Lee and April and Doug, sitting in the dappled shade of the scrub trees, on their slashers--big knives like the kind Crocodile Dundee flashed in Manhattan--to keep their bottoms off the mud.

There is the sound of the odd jay in the trees. A far-off curse by a fisherman who’s just dropped a fish from his hook. A nearby rustle of something small under the leaves.

“We’re a bit slower than regular people, that’s all,” says Doug, 23. “People who need to take it slower should try this. It shows them about work.”

Lee and April nod. They don’t speak too much to outsiders, unless you really push them.

“Like, at home I was a slob,” says Doug. “I never did anything for my parents. I left a mess in my room. Never mowed the lawn. Now, I’m out of there at 5:45 every morning. To come to work here. They’ve taught me to enjoy working. I’m earning money. Plus I help my dad now all the time. I’m always asking them what I can do next.”

The others nod agreement.

“I was working at Rex disassembling bike parts,” says April. Rex Industries is a sheltered workshop for “mentally challenged” people--people with any problem affecting mental function, from retardation to epilepsy to head injury to emotional problems. April is epileptic.

“But here we’re learning things,” she says. “Useful things. How to clear tracks, fight forest fires, fight floods. And Adolfo teaches us a lot.”

Adolfo Ramirez is their supervisor. He’s a year younger than his three charges, but is like a stern and loving father to them. All the way around the lake he has been talking of the things he has taught them: How to cut trails, how to fight erosion, how to be responsible for one another, what insects and plants are poisonous, how to be a group: If one hurts, the whole crew goes down. But mainly he teaches them how to work, how to be useful citizens. That is what this is about.

3 Months Old

“This” is the North County Conservation Corps. And around these three corps members out at Lake Poway, a storm is raging. The corps is only 3 months old, but it could be history by tonight. It has the money, it has the staff, it has the work for dozens of young people. All it lacks is the disadvantaged people themselves. Lee and April and Doug are it--after nearly six months’ recruiting.

Tonight, a board meeting of the North County Association of Retarded Citizens will decide whether to kill the $176,000 program or give it time to find the people it claims it can do so much for.

The California Conservation Corps, which awarded the program to the association and gave it $122,000, or upward of three-quarters of the budget, is considering pulling funds if no more recruits appear. The California Department of Rehabilitation has picked up the remaining bill--about $53,000--and promised support through its counselors, the primary source of recruits for the program. It too is happy to see it prosper but will let it die if it can’t come up with the recruits.

The problem, for Gary Luce, whose baby this whole idea is, is the guardians of the mentally disabled. They won’t let him at them, he says. They won’t let him show parents how he could really help their kids back into the mainstream, he asserts.

For months now, Luce has been punching against a sponge rubber wall of the nicest possible people giving him the greatest possible encouragement--but no recruits for his program. He has visited and talked to the state Department of Rehabilitation’s counselors--each of whom has a number of mentally disabled cases and, says Luce, a predisposition, at least in North County, to “safe” programs that keep their charges happy but separated from the world of “normal” people.

Special Courses

He believes they are locked in “enrichment” programs, special courses at community colleges--everything but programs specifically aimed at returning them to as normal and productive a life as possible on the “outside.”

“Everybody is very supportive, verbally,” said Luce. “But we never get further than that.”

One obvious problem in prosperous North County: “What we do, and what we teach is not real prestige work,” said Luce. “Sanitation, landscaping . . . but we’ve chosen these, because they kind of ease our people into society. It’s easier for them to mingle, plus these are jobs that need people.

“April, for instance, she’s guaranteed work when she gets out. The other two, also. But a lot of people think they can do better. Parents, they still want better things for their children, so they keep them at special programs at community colleges.”

Heading the counselors of the Department of Rehabilitation is Arvis Steiner, the district administrator for the department in San Diego. She says she encouraged her people to support Luce’s program.

Support Questioned

But there’s a feeling on Luce’s team that the support is, well, not 100%.

When called, Steiner said she didn’t know of Luce’s recruitment problems. “Why hasn’t he called me and told me he’s short?” she said.

“The person we talk to,” said Luce, “is Ms. Steiner’s program supervisor, Barbara Brown. She told me she did tell Arvis about it. Barbara is our link.”

“There are a certain amount of bureaucratic politics here,” said Luce’s program manager, Linda Price. “We set up a ‘public day’ last month precisely to show what we were trying to do, and what problems we had. We invited departmental people from all over California, representatives from senators’ offices, the press.

“And, of course, we invited Ms. Steiner. We were told she had injured her leg. Barbara Brown came representing her. It would be very surprising if Ms. Brown didn’t relay what she saw and heard that day back to Ms. Steiner. There seems to be a wait-and-see-if-they-survive attitude. Not a ‘let’s make this succeed, because it is so important.’ ”

“There still seems to be a problem in government departments,” said Luce, “where sticking with existing budgets is easier than trying out new things that require a bit of faith. Perhaps counselors don’t realize that while giving us one of their charges will cost them more at the start, as these people get into the work force we’ll actually be saving the department and the taxpayers a lot of money--because we have created good, productive citizens.”

“Gary’s problem is parents,” said CCC’s Escondido director, Tom Miller, who gives Luce a lot of the facilities for his people. “He’s got to get to the parents. They’re always apprehensive about letting their children out of arm’s reach. He has to get their confidence.”

Luce agrees.

But one way or another, the dream is not reaching critical mass. Without more recruits, the program will surely die--and provide Luce with one more crisis in an idealist’s life already strewn with crises created by a guy who won’t lie down and accept the status quo.

Luce goes through life in a wheelchair. He suffers from cerebral palsy, but that hasn’t stopped him getting a degree in business administration from the University of California, Riverside, and running his own concrete and landscaping companies.

All along, as he mixed with government-funded programs of the Dept. of Rehabilitation, with the Association for Retarded Citizens, Rex Industries and the community college system’s special programs, he has become more and more convinced that they were locked into caring for mentally challenged people but not getting them out into mainstream, useful lives.

So he invented the North County Conservation Corps, as an offshoot of former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s California Conservation Corps. But, said Luce, his idea is to help not only the mentally challenged, but also the beleaguered employers of the area.

“When I was running my concreting company, I saw the problem all employers have first hand: entry-level people, the laborers,” Luce said as he drove toward Poway in his specially equipped van. “They were the most difficult to retain. They felt no loyalty. They didn’t stay. Because they wanted better jobs, better pay. And yet you always need the guys to go buy the lunches, go pick up the nails. Sweep up, hammer stakes. You don’t want to pay some guy $20 an hour to go pick up some timber.

“It dawned on me that many of the people in the sheltered workshops and ‘enrichment programs’ would be perfectly capable of doing these entry-level jobs in landscaping and construction. Many of them would be approaching the maximum of their abilities--but that’s fine, because that means job satisfaction, that means a person who will not be gone tomorrow seeking greener fields. I saw it as an answer to two needs.”

Lumar Enterprises--his and his wife’s company--went under, largely because of under-capitalization. Luce lost everything. But the idea of putting mentally challenged people into the more basic jobs of the industry stuck.

Used as Assistants

“I had already brought in disabled people as assistants to my journeymen tradespeople. They were so keen and loyal: a real bonding took place,” he said. “Plus the tradespeople felt good because they were also doing something good. This was their laborer. They took pride in their opportunity to teach somebody.”

“When our company dissolved in 1985, I think all my tradesmen took their laborers with them--kept them on,” he said. “My company failed, but that was my success. That’s where I got my ideas.”

Luce finally found a grant being offered by the CCC to help disadvantaged young people between the ages of 18 and 23.

“I realize that we have many people (in the Association for Retarded Citizens and the Department of Rehabilitation) who do try to place our young people in jobs,” said Luce. “But they’re asking employers to take them on unseen, untrained--on trust.

“I realized that the CCC idea could be good for our young people. Because it would teach them about work before we threw them at employers. We could use CCC’s discipline and training methods to develop responsible habits with our people.”

The program started Sept. 14--a six-month trial to instill skills in landscaping, sanitation and parks maintenance at an on-the-job learning opportunity that pays $3.35 an hour and provides anyone who completes the six months with the one thing all employers demand: a work record.

Week of Induction

This first group underwent a week of induction with regular CCC crews.

“That was a great week,” said Price, who did the course with them. “At first they were shocked at what they were being asked to do. They kept complaining about being disabled. But the regular guys were terrific, and for the first time they were adapting to a peer group of non-disabled people--and it stretched them wonderfully.”

They have had one drop-out, a young man who wanted too much to get back to his friends and the hope of a real regular job. All three others want to extend the six months to a year--an option they have.

So where do Luce’s bosses, North County Association of Retarded Citizens stand? Tonight’s board meeting will tell. “The board is split 50-50 on this,” says Chuck Roles, a board member sympathetic to Luce. “Those against the program are mainly parents of children too handicapped to be able to use it. They want more money for day care. They know that’s good for their kids. And in this financial climate, it’s hard enough financing proven programs.”

Age May be Problem

“We recommended to cut if they defaulted on recruits by mid-December at our meeting last month,” said Nancy Tiburski, executive director of North County Association of Retarded Citizens. “I think the age restriction may be a problem. I know this is the wrong time of year to try recruiting . . . “

Perhaps there aren’t that many young people between 18 and 23 who need this kind of program?

Luce looks frustrated.

“Believe me, it is easier to leave these kind of people taking tennis credits at Mesa or other ‘enrichment’ classes, rather than try to change their life,” he said. “But they are out there.”

Meanwhile, back at Lake Poway, Lee and April and Doug get up to resume their trail-cutting.

Ramirez said, “Two years ago I was working with my family in the fields. Helping my dad pick strawberries and raspberries and squash.

“Now I have shown I can make it in the world. I have a fiancee. I have a child. And I am doing something that is teaching these people things. They will be able to use these in their lives. My dad is proud of me. I am proud of myself, too. But mostly I’m proud of my corps members. I want this program to go on. I have a child at home, but these too are my children.”