A major grant to South Dakota State University will help train rehabilitation counselors who can help people with disabilities find places within the workforce.
The grant puts a special emphasis on training for counselors who can help veterans returning from war.
It provides $749,000 over a five-year period to allow SDSU to support master's degree students in the program with funds for tuition and fees.
The grant is the latest step for SDSU's recently formed rehabilitation counseling program, which has attained national accreditation through the Council on Rehabilitation Education. The student scholarship grant is from the Rehabilitation Services Administration, a federal program associated with the Department of Education.
Jay Trenhaile, head of SDSU's Counseling and Human Development Department, said the award shows the importance of the work the program does in training students to fill a key niche in the economy and the larger society.
Professor Alan Davis added that rehabilitation counselors are specially trained to help people with physical and psychiatric disabilities obtain gainful employment and to function as fully integrated members of their communities.
"The people that we train are professional counselors, and the specialty in rehabilitation counseling allows them to work with an unusually high level of knowledge concerning physical and psychiatric disabilities and what those conditions mean in practical terms in the life of the individual," Davis said.
Students who receive support under the program will be responsible to work as rehabilitation counselors in the field for two years in repayment for every year of scholarship support that they have been provided by the Department of Education.
"It's a scholarship, but in essence it's a contract. And of course the objective of this program, broadly speaking, is to increase the number of qualified rehabilitation counselors in the field," Davis said. "There's a great need and it's rapidly growing."
Davis said the Americans with Disabilities Act, approved by Congress in 1990 and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, did a great deal to eliminate workplace barriers and also helped change attitudes toward workers with disabilities.
"As a result we're seeing more of a need for rehabilitation counselors than there ever was before in order to meet this growing demand, especially in the field of psychiatric disabilities. That was a disability group that once lived in quiet shame and stayed out of sight socially, politically, economically, in every way. That is no longer true. Now they recognize themselves as individuals who have nothing to be ashamed about and they want to do the same things that other people are doing. They want to have a career, they want to have a home, and so there's been a dramatic increase in the number of people with psychiatric disabilities who are in need of service and assistance."
Davis added that the grant singles out veterans for special attention.
"One of the major objectives of this grant is to give our rehabilitation counseling program a special emphasis on the problems of veterans returning from war with physical and psychiatric disabilities. There are a lot of psychiatric casualties in war, and this is a part of the country where the patriotism runs high. We have to really be aware of the needs of disabled veterans," he said.
Some states and agencies that work in career counseling are creating new positions for rehabilitation counselors to keep pace with the demand for such services. In addition, Davis noted, many rehabilitation counselors are going into retirement across the nation as the baby boomer generation moves into its retirement years.
"It means that we need bright, talented, dedicated young people as we have never needed them before," Davis said. "It's a great time for them to be coming along in their careers because there is a real need for them. It's a seller's market for them when they complete that master's degree."
Source: South Dakota State University