The job hunt

Maryland’s Developmental Disabilities Administration serves about 25,000 people with developmental and intellectual disabilities each year. It helps them find jobs, teaches life skills — money management, cooking dinner, taking a public bus to work — and troubleshoots problems in the workplace.

Waiting for services are another 5,300 people who can’t live on their own without help.

The U.S. Department of Labor has created rules aimed at disrupting the school-to-segregated workshop pipeline by pressuring states to ensure students with disabilities are leaving schools ready to work and to provide targeted employment.

Some parents say their children are too vulnerable to be working in the general population, or require constant therapeutic support. And companies concerned about the bottom line worry that hiring people with disabilities — who might require accommodations — will may cost them time and money.

The Arc Baltimore trains clients to prepare surgical trays at hospitals, to work on janitorial and landscaping crews and to perform other marketable tasks.

Joanna Falcone, director of competitive employment for The Arc Baltimore, says people with autism and other disabilities have much to offer employers.

Falcone says parents starting businesses to employ their children show that policies and perceptions have not yet caught up with reality.

Still, advocates say, the community is seeing a radical shift.

Employers are becoming more aware of the potential of people on the spectrum, technology is advancing, and the workers themselves are demanding equal pay and opportunities.

“We’re getting dramatically better at helping people understand the different skills and abilities,” said Leslie Long, a vice president of Autism Speaks.

Autism — a developmental disability that is caused by a mix of genetic and environmental factors — presents as a range of conditions, including repetitive behaviors and challenges with social skills and communication. About a third of people with autism do not speak (some of these communicate without words). About a third have IQs of 70 and lower.

Diagnoses of autism have more than doubled in the last 15 years, largely because awareness has increased.

As a little boy, Sam Myers struggled with speech. He sometimes had a hard time remembering specific words or shaping his mouth to form the right sounds.

As an adult, he is resistant to change, his father says, but he managed to try out an assortment of positions — working in a computer lab, a bookstore, an office and in dining services — through a program that allows people with autism to sample