Autism Awareness Month Starts Tomorrow

It's been a while since I've posted about my middle child, who happens to have an autism spectrum disorder. When I last posted about her two years ago, she had graduated from community college with a two year degree in Early Childhood Education. After a few months of searching, she landed her first job ever, as a floater at a day care. She was working five days a week, for four hours per day.

That job lasted about six weeks. She was told on a random Tuesday that, "It's not working out" and not to come back. A bit of a shock, since according to her, she was never told that she was doing anything wrong in the prior six weeks. Never had a review; never given a chance to improve. Truth be told, she didn't like it there. As someone who follows rules and had just graduated, she often told me that the place did not follow 'best practices in early childhood education.' It made her uncomfortable, but it's not like she would ever say something.

I told her we would take a break for the rest of the summer and resume her job search in the fall. She continued sending out her resume to preschools, as well as applying online to a variety of other unskilled labor type of jobs (grocery stores, etc.) As she doesn't drive, we had to look at reasonable distances for me to take her on a daily basis. When Target called and asked if she could work a 4 am - 9 am shift, she had to say no. I have my limits.

She had maybe a half a dozen interviews, which yielded nothing. As she is high-functioning, we have always debated whether it is wise for her to say anything about her disability in an interview. While you don't want to be discriminated against, there's also the question of how an interviewer is going to perceive someone who has trouble with eye contact, communication, and non-verbal cues.

Then there was the disability job fair. Considering I'm on at least five different disability organizations' e-mail lists, you would think that a state-run job fair would have been on everyone's radar. No; I started receiving notices about it the night before it was to take place. Am I the only one who found that rather odd? I tried googling to get more information than the time and place listed in the e-mails and could find nothing. Weird, but we made copies of her resume and planned to go the following day to the hotel conference center where it was being held.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, considering the short notice. The massive parking lot was full when we arrived and I had to drive around and around till I secured a space. I guess when we walked in, I was expecting to see people with disabilities. You know, maybe some wheelchairs, service dogs for the blind, young adults with downs syndrome. Now, I realize that my own daughter doesn't look as though she has a disability on first glance. But this crowd? Basically, a ton of middle-aged men wandering around. Most being overweight. I seriously did not see one person with a discernible disability.

When we arrived at the registration table, they asked for my name. I pointed to my daughter beside me and said we were here for her and that they wouldn't have her name on their list, as we had just found out about the fair last night. That surprised the person, but she wrote down my daughter's name and then gave us a four page sheet of job positions by employer. We headed in to the conference room, but there was no walking room, and the employer booths were about six feet deep in people. Since crowds tend to disturb my daughter, I told her we should go back out to the lobby, sit down, and look at the sheets to see which employers she should seek out. I kept this paper, so here are just some of the highlights:

Engineering shift manager at a metal plant
RN for a home health company
Delivery driver for a dairy
Security guard at a university
Machine operator for a welding company
Forklift operator in a warehouse

Can I ask what sort of disability one could have that would allow for any of those jobs? Sure, there were a few other jobs (bank teller, call center) that were more on the unskilled end, but certainly nothing that my daughter would be able to realistically do. We left very discouraged.

That was 2015. In my next post, I will have more positive news about 2016.