Ticket to Work: Ticket to Nowhere?

Aspect of Need Addressed: Occupational

A call came the other day for my disabled son. It was from a firm called MAXIMUS Ticket to Work, the agency contracted by the Social Security Administration to run its "Ticket to Work" program. Angela, a "Ticket Services Coordinator", had left a message for my son to call back.

The call was to see if my son had his Ticket to Work and whether he needed more assistance. When I called back on his behalf, a girl named Helen answered the phone. Helen clearly didn't know too much about the program. Most of her answers she read from a script. She frequently put me on hold to ask for more information from elsewhere. The outreach was appreciated, but not very effective.

In March, Angela had also called my son about Ticket to Work. At that time she sent him its list of "Employment Networks and State Vocational Rehabilitation Agencies which have agreed to serve your area". The list has the names of 64 agencies. Some of duplicates. All have an associated letter designation, A, B, and C. The As are those "in your local area". The Bs are those in your state. The Cs are national organizations that can serve the Ticket to Work ticket holder. But an inspection of the list shows that several firms designated "A" are not in our local area. Indeed, they are not even in our state. Among the As are firms in Racine, WI; Madison, WI; Brooklyn, NY.

As the father of a mentally disabled individual, I get quite annoyed with this kind of government inefficiency. Here's a massive program designed to help the disabled get back to work. Yet the administration of the program is complicated to say the least. A visit to the program's website, http://www.yourtickettowork.com/, will confirm this.

To get a feeling of what "Employment Networks" are and how they get to be part of the program, I clicked into the Employment Networks area. There I found a thicket of hard to interpret explanations and a blizzard of words. This program, I fear, is one of the large well-meaning but ineffectual programs that is wasting a ton of Federal money. It just does not seem well managed. It seems particularly difficult for a mentally ill loved one to navigate. My son's previous experience with this program to date has been sub par.