ATLANTA — Evan Wainwright has always just wanted to work.

The 38-year-old navigates the world in a wheelchair, his legs contracted from the cerebral palsy that impacted his body but not his mind. Though he’d earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, Wainwright said potential employers were skeptical he could succeed.

So, Wainwright turned to the Georgia Vocational Rehabilitation Agency, a government organization that says its core mission is to help people with disabilities find and maintain jobs.

What he said he got instead was a counselor who scoffed at his dream and would not respond to him for months at a time. Whenever he returned to the agency office, he’d meet a new counselor who would advise him to freshen his resume.

“It was just everyone passing my folder around,” he said.

To Wainwright, the GVRA failed in its core mission, just as it has with countless Georgians who want to work but have disabilities that can be an impediment to employment, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found in an analysis of state and federal data. Former clients and counselors, along with a civil rights complaint from an advocacy group, reached that same conclusion.

“It’s so broken right now, I don’t even know what it would take to fix it,” Cara Waiswilos, a former GVRA counselor, said, adding, “I’m not mad anymore, I’m heartbroken.”

Raw numbers from a federal agency reveal a damning portrait: Fewer and fewer people who sought GVRA’s help found jobs, and those who did were often funneled into jobs as fast-food workers, janitors, stockers or cashiers. In fact, federal officials found that GVRA did not “prioritize the employment rate” among its participants, nor did the agency do much to encourage people to get vocational or occupational training or go to college, federal monitors found in a report issued in March.

On the key measure of employment, Georgia is among the worst performing states in the nation in recent years. From July 2021 to June 2022, Georgia ranked as the worst in terms of employing its participants when they exited the program, recording an employment rate of 21.5%. The following year, it improved slightly, but was still among the nation’s worst.

That’s no surprise to those with disabilities or their families: The number of people turning to GVRA for help plunged nearly 50% from July 2019 through June 2022. Records show employees have also fled the agency, many fed up with crushing caseloads, leaving the agency staffed with key workers who have limited experience. The agency has also been forced to send back tens of millions of federal dollars that could have helped people who suffer from vision loss, are hearing impaired or have other physical, mental or emotional impairments.

GVRA Executive Director Chris Wells did not make himself available for an interview for this story, and Gov. Brian Kemp’s office deferred comments to the GVRA. In response to written questions, GVRA provided a statement from Wells saying that the agency is improving because of the work of counselors, staff and service providers across the state. The agency also sent the AJC figures that show it added thousands of participants to the program.

“We are confident that the latest data and changes to alleviate service barriers will show that the issues are being addressed, better positioning the agency to provide quality services, regardless of need,” Wells said in the statement.

To get on a better footing, GVRA told federal monitors who conducted an on-site review in March 2023 that it has worked to reduce workloads through a cleanup of its client rolls and removing people who weren’t responsive or interested in receiving services. Counselors described that in different terms to federal monitors: Because they were overwhelmed, they were mass-closing cases. Over a recent five-year period, GVRA closed the cases of nearly 37,000 Georgians.

In all, Wainwright said he spent eight years trying to get help from the agency. He said that staff once found work for him at a bill collection agency, but he said they didn’t provide him with a desk suited for a wheelchair and he left after just one day.

In 2020, he opened a letter that stated his case was closed.

He said he still has no idea why.

A stinging complaint

In 2023, 10 people — a group of former GVRA clients, counselors and providers — submitted testimony as part of a civil rights complaint alleging systemic failures within the agency. That complaint, which hasn’t previously been made public, was filed by a legal team known as the Georgia Advocacy Office, which represents Georgians with disabilities. The AJC obtained a copy of the complaint in which the names of those who provided testimony were redacted.

The document, submitted to the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education, alleges “a systemic pattern of discrimination and disregard by the Georgia Vocational Rehabilitation Agency for the rights of (Georgians) with disabilities” who are seeking employment. Hundreds of thousands of Georgians of working age have disabilities, and the complaint says GVRA is currently helping only a fraction of them and failing in its central mission of helping this population find employment.

“These numbers paint a grim picture,” the complaint says. “GVRA is not adequately serving even a small percentage of working-age Georgians with disabilities.”

One former client, who is blind and on the autism spectrum, said she went five months without hearing from anyone at the agency, according to the complaint. She terminated GVRA services because the agency took more than a year to provide her with the therapy to learn skills she needed to live independently after high school. GVRA also told her it could not provide any of the assistive technology she needed for college, according to the complaint.

Another client, also blind, said he received just one job offer during several years with the agency, the complaint says. Once he secured the position, he alleges that GVRA refused to help advocate for accommodations for him, which resulted in him losing the job.

“There exists a pervasive community apathy regarding the GVRA ability to make meaningful change,” the complaint says.

The DOE’s Office for Civil Rights, as a matter of policy, would not confirm it had received the complaint.

Julie Kegley, a senior staff attorney for the Georgia Advocacy Office, said in a statement that its office has not received anything in writing from the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights regarding the complaint’s status, nor has the office directly communicated with GVRA about the complaint.

In a written response, Wells said the agency was unaware of the complaint but that the agency is proud of what it has achieved, particularly its “incremental growth and progress” since the pandemic. After the AJC provided GVRA with extensive details from the complaint, the agency said the allegations appear to be unsubstantiated and that it could not comment on the limited information.

“Our staff is committed to delivering quality service to our clients and potential clients across the state; and we are equally dedicated to fulfilling our mission of helping Georgians with disabilities obtain or maintain meaningful employment,” Wells said in his statement.

More than a decade ago, while Wainwright sat in a GVRA office in Tucker, a counselor handed him an intake form and asked how much he’d like to make. Wainwright said he wrote down $12 an hour. That seemed like a reasonable goal, he thought, given his college degree and the ever-rising cost of living.

Wainwright, who told the AJC he was one of the former GVRA clients who testified in the complaint, says his counselor essentially told him to lower his expectations.

“It just made me feel like they’re part of the problem,” Wainwright said, adding that it seemed as though “they are feeling we can only achieve so much.”

In 2021, Wainwright found some shift work to help supplement his Social Security income, including occasional work as a greeter at Walmart. But he knows he’s underemployed, and he doesn’t want to live off Social Security for the rest of his life.

“I’m not asking anybody to give me anything that I’m not worthy of or to give me a free pass,” Wainwright said. “I’m just asking for help to get in the door.”

Red-tape failures

Former counselors who were cited in the complaint or who spoke with the AJC trace the agency’s failures to crushing workloads, loss of experienced staff and shortsighted decisions.

When Waiswilos thinks back to her time as a GVRA counselor, one thing sticks out in her mind: the volume of paperwork. Even if the client’s request was simple — for example, a $60 white cane to aid someone experiencing vision loss — the amount of agency red tape was so onerous a response could take weeks.

Multiply that across dozens of tasks and caseloads with as much as 200 people and, for Waiswilos, the work felt insurmountable — at times, maddening.

Waiswilos, who told the AJC she submitted testimony as part of the civil rights complaint, said it felt as though nothing could go right, even for clients who were highly motivated.

Other former employees tie the agency’s failings to the GVRA employing fewer experienced counselors. For example, the agency said that in 2019 it had 82 counselors on staff who are certified rehabilitation counselors, and it now has 61. A certified rehabilitation counselor is someone who has expertise in helping people with disabilities live a full life, including navigating employment challenges.

In the complaint, a former counselor who started in 2020 and left in 2021 said that in the previous four years, clients who had visual impairments had been without a counselor for months at a time because employees would quit, and their positions would stay open far too long. She also cited decisions from higher-ups that she said undermined success. One was a GVRA directive to stop paying for all clients’ transportation, because 75% of the district’s budget for transportation had been used halfway through the fiscal year. Without transportation, the counselor’s blind clients were no longer able to attend independent navigation skills classes, for which GVRA was spending thousands of dollars.

Records show the agency has been mired in problems for years.

Tracy Bumgarner, a former counselor who is deaf, said things started going downhill in 2012, when vocational rehabilitation services were separated from the Georgia Department of Labor and the GVRA was created.

The bureaucracy became unmanageable and approving a service for a client took “10 times” as long, she said in a text-chat interview with the AJC. In one case, Bumgarner said one of her clients lost her job while waiting for hearing aids.

“It became so difficult to provide good services with cumbersome procedures. I was not allowed to tell clients exactly why their cases were delayed,” she said.

GVRA also let go reputable providers, or organizations that knew how to serve clients who were deaf or blind, in favor of cheaper, less experienced ones, she said.

Ronnie Mae Tyson, a longtime vocational rehabilitation counselor who retired in April 2023, said the agency also filled vacancies with counselors who were not specialized to work with the deaf community. Some counselors who were inexperienced in working with the deaf would incorrectly assess clients as having an intellectual disability, she said.

Specialized counselors such as Tyson, who herself is deaf, faced other barriers in doing their jobs.

She said GVRA leadership sometimes would hold statewide staff meetings and forget to request an interpreter. That meant pulling in an interpreter by video, and that interpreter often couldn’t as effectively communicate with deaf employees. On one occasion, she said there was no interpreter at all.

“I believe I missed a lot pertaining to my job,” she said in a written interview. “I really got scared, honestly.”

Under the federal microscope

The federal government mandates that every state must help people with disabilities pursue meaningful employment, and it gives out funds to achieve that end. But Georgia has returned tens of millions of federal funds, and much of that money has been redistributed to other states.

The federal government has routinely monitored Georgia’s vocational rehabilitation services, including three times since 2017. That’s an unusual frequency, according to Amy Scherer, a senior staff attorney for the National Disability Rights Network. The Rehabilitation Services Administration, the federal entity that oversees vocational rehabilitation agencies, typically spreads monitoring across as many states as possible.

“The fact that (the federal government) actually came back three different times … shows that there were significant problems that were not addressed,” Scherer said.

Federal records show that GVRA was monitored in fiscal years 2017, 2020 and 2023, more than any other comparable state agency.

Those earlier reviews by federal monitors found persistent issues. Among them, the 2020 report found that the overall employment rate had declined by about 9 percentage points, to 30%.

Georgia recently sent back tens of millions of dollars in unused funds to the federal government, including $25 million the state had already matched.

The GVRA has also closed 10 offices across the state in recent years; it said a significant increase in rental rates, combined with budget reductions, were among the reasons for the closures.

In the most recent monitoring report, the federal government said Georgia had a nearly 50% drop in the number of applicants and a plunge in the number of students with disabilities who received preemployment services.

The report also shows the agency has often failed to meet a federal requirement of setting aside and spending 15% of its federal funds on preemployment training for students with disabilities. The GVRA told the AJC it met the 15% requirement for program year 2022 and is projected to meet it again. This would be the GVRA’s first time complying for two consecutive years. The agency said as of May it had also seen a 12% increase in the number of students it was serving.

Just a few weeks before the monitoring report was released in March, Wells, the GVRA executive director, addressed a state budget committee meeting to mark the agency’s progress. In his testimony, Wells painted an optimistic picture of the agency’s direction and reported that the counselor turnover rate had fallen to 3% in fiscal 2023.

“Turnover is down, our counselors are up and we continue to hire,” Wells said at the committee hearing.

More updated turnover data show the counselor turnover is now at 17%, according to the GVRA.

During an on-site visit by federal monitoring staff in March 2023, GVRA personnel often used terms such as “staying afloat” or “keeping our head above water” to describe workload demands. Despite increases in pay, the monitoring report said the GVRA has struggled as the rate of employee departures has outpaced the hiring rate.

“This imbalance leads to a challenging cycle of burnout and job dissatisfaction, resulting in high staff turnover,” the monitoring report said.

In all, the GVRA had 86 fewer counselors as of June 30 than it did in state fiscal year 2016, according to the agency.

‘I’m still struggling’

The core principle of these vocational rehabilitation programs is that anyone with disabilities, including those with the most significant ones, are capable of high-quality employment when provided with the necessary services. When the GVRA had successfully placed someone in a job, it was almost always for a role for unskilled or semiskilled employment, such as a customer service representative, fast-food worker or cashier, according to the latest federal monitoring report.

Pervasive problems over years resulted in widespread dissatisfaction among people with disabilities and their families.

In 2014, a counselor read aloud to Joshua Williams a report assessing the 19-year-old’s abilities in agonizing detail, including that he was unemployable.

“I already knew what I could not do,” said Williams, now 29, who has cerebral palsy. “I pretty much already knew what they were going to say when they read that report.”

Williams said the GVRA paid for him to go to college but never helped him find a job after he graduated in 2020. In his mind, the GVRA did more harm than good because it left him feeling defeated.

“I’m still struggling to this day, but my mom pulled me out of it,” he said. The two of them now jointly run an organization that works to improve accessibility at businesses.

For those who eventually get help, the results can be too little, too late. Cecily Laney Nipper, president of the Georgia Council of the Blind, told the AJC she has seen the shift firsthand.

When Nipper’s vision first diminished in 2010, the GVRA helped her learn how to navigate her home with a cane, cook meals for herself and safely travel. In 2021, her vision deteriorated further, putting her job as a medical transcriptionist in jeopardy. She needed to learn to use screen-reading software, as quickly as possible, to ensure her transcripts were accurate.

She applied for additional services in December 2021. At first, she was calling the GVRA for an update every month. Eventually, she switched to weekly calls.

“I was hearing things like, ‘Oh, we didn’t get your paperwork,’ or ‘Oh, we got it but, accidentally, we shredded it. Can you send it again?’ Or ‘There’s been a delay,’ or ‘That person no longer works here,'” she said. “Every week, it seemed like there was a new obstacle related to inefficiency on their end.”

Her employer was willing to wait about three months, so she learned the software and paid for training — entirely on her own.

For the next 16 months, Nipper’s counselor changed three times. She said when she finally was granted services in April 2023, the GVRA paid her for a certificate program on the screen-reading software so she could teach others who needed the help.

Waiswilos still cries when she talks about her decision in August 2021 to leave GVRA as a supervisor. This spring, she printed out her formal resignation letter and brought it to her interview with an AJC reporter at a coffee shop.

Waiswilos clutched the letter as she read it aloud, her eyes heavy with tears.

We live in a society that treats people with disabilities with no value, she said. But a state agency like the GVRA could implement “real cultural change” for this population.

“Disability services in the state of Georgia are scarce, and we are not meeting the needs of our community to improve equitable access for people with disabilities to enter the workforce,” Waiswilos said. “This is our piece of the puzzle to improve all aspects of life for people with disabilities.”

“We cannot forget how important it is to stay focused on that mission.”

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