Integrated Work Opportunities for Adults with Severe Handicaps: The Extended Training Option

One major reason why those adults with the most severe intellectual handicaps are prevented from performing meaningful work in nonsheltered environments is the requirement that they cannot do so unless they receive direct pay. Unfortunately, as long as direct pay is an admission requirement to the real world of work, confinement to unnecessarily costly, antihabilitative, and counterproductive segregated facilities and prevocational programs that never lead to real work in the real world will prevail. The highly selective and closely monitored use of an Extended Training Option is offered as a reasonable procedure that can be used to arrange for nonsheltered functioning while the attitudes and skills necessary for direct pay are developed. Specifically, workers with severe intellectual handicaps should be placed in nonsheltered vocational environments, unless health considerations are contraindicated. Then they should be taught to perform meaningful work. Then all reasonable attempts to secure contingent direct pay should be made. Direct pay can no longer function as a barrier to integrated work opportunities.