Letter of Reflection - 2025

A Letter of Reflection from the Director of the Washington State Department of Services for the Blind

Dear RSA Interim Commissioner Christopher Pope and Governor Bob Ferguson:

At the close of 2025, I am honored as Executive Director of the Washington State’s Department of Services for the Blind (DSB) to join the State Rehabilitation Council – Blind in sharing agency highlights of this past year.

There were numerous collective efforts in 2025 towards improving agency processes, deepening focus on the customer experience, and growing the skills, expertise and coordination of DSB staff to better support all DSB customers – our career-seeking customers as well as our business customers.

The comprehensive statewide needs assessment for this period identified opportunities to:

• Simplify processes
• Improve customer interactions and communications
• More holistically support customers’ concurrent multiple disabilities in addition to their visual disability
• Deepen workforce partnerships and support of business customer needs
• Innovate and expand self-advocacy and career exploration services for youth and students who are blind, low vision or deafblind, and their families

Simplify rehabilitation and workflow processes to better focus on customer needs and outcomes

Our process improvement efforts this past year aligned closely with the goals set forward in the DSB-specific sections of the 2024 Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Washington State Plan, and many are a continuation of initiatives started in 2024. In 2025, we practiced, assessed and revised business practices in a year of “Baking It In”.  The intent of the reforms is to better serve all our customers, and to make the career-seeking customer experience a supportive and meaningful engagement that moves each individual more securely and consistently to achieving their career goals.

We had reorganized our business structure, creating intertwining programs to support the needs of the career-seeking customer with a disability and the business customer seeking talent and supports to develop disability-friendly workplaces. In 2025 we solidified practices and developed process maps and systems for internal provision of services among the programs. We increased business service provision by 800%.

We had also radically altered our intake, eligibility and planning processes to streamline career-seeking customer entry into services.

In 2025 we refined customer intake processes by centralizing the processing of intakes and eligibility determinations and hiring those positions at the Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor level. We are better able to standardize the customer experience at intake and eligibility and have significantly reduced time-to-plan measures (reduced by 33%).

The planning process was radically reshaped into what is called “milestone planning”. The focus of the milestone planned services is on short-term activities of what the individual is able to commit to working towards now, with new milestone plans created in three- to six- month timespans as the goals are achieved and the individual identifies the next step they are willing to commit to. These milestone plans all lead to the identified career goal and are designed to generate more active conversation with counselor and customer on activities, achievement, next steps, and obstacles and supports needed to get through the obstacles. The intent is to create a system where the counselor and customer is more able to build the trust and relationship that is necessary to persist in the vocational rehabilitation efforts even when it is at its most difficult, and to provide flexibilities that account for adult learning and decisioning needs. Our measure for success is to gauge what percentage of those who enter services also exit with their career goal achieved. For the past four years the measure was a static (and low) 30% rate exiting with career goal. In the past year we have raised the rate to 42%. Our end goal is for 70% of those who enter services also exit with a career.

With all the new process flows, there will continue to be a need for further analysis and refinement. There was some high achievement and progress towards the vision of these process changes in 2025, and still more to go.

Strengthening the agency’s focus on improving the responsiveness, quality, and frequency of counselor/participant communications

The intent of the structural process changes described above is to increase the responsiveness and quality of communication at the earliest stages of engagement. We have reduced the time from referral to intake from two weeks to one day, and we reduced by 38% the time from intake to eligibility. We intend to get the career-seeking customer into services as rapidly as possible and have made good strides in that goal.

We have worked to update, refresh and streamline the resources and information we provide the customer in the earliest stages of the vocational rehabilitation process, and are in process of plain talking our agency vocational rehabilitation policy found in the Washington Administrative Code. We are in process as well of plain talking all our internal policies in order to ensure the guidelines and rules we operate under are understood by all in a standard and consistent way.

We have developed internal controls for understanding the depth, quality and frequency of agency counseling and guidance with customers, a critical resource for supporting the customer needs, aligning goals and working through environmental obstacles. With the change to milestone planning and shorter-term more-focused plan goals and services, more frequent and meaningful communication among counselor and customer will be essential. The centralization of the Intake process and shifted duties to administrative support is intended to result in more counselor time available for more frequent check ins to encourage, cheerlead and resolve issues that arise. We are working to create a structure that allows counselors more time to utilize their skills as counselors, and thus keeping the plan moving forward and progressing.

Focus on staff training on how to best serve WA DSB populations including individuals with multiple disabilities

The agency has worked hard to consistently identify and address all functional limitations due to disability that can prevent an individual from getting, keeping or promoting in their career. This includes addressing disabilities other than visual disabilities. Our Client Assistance Program partners have acknowledged this agency practice at a State Rehabilitation Council meeting earlier this year.

While consistently identifying functional limitations due to multiple disabilities, we recognize there are gaps in our skills and resources of how best to support individuals with multiple disabilities. We have many new staff, and many new to counseling. Our new internal training team is planning to provide training on the understanding of various disability conditions and how they might interact with visual disabilities. This is in addition to increasing knowledge of the resources that exist outside of DSB that we might partner with to best support an individual with multiple disabilities.

Our 2024 State Plan goal identified our Deaf-Blind customers as an underserved population, noting the challenges of coordination of services and providing services that meet the needs of individuals who identify as Deaf-Blind or who have concurrent hearing and visual disabilities. The State Rehabilitation Council has taken a lead role in initiating surveys and listening sessions to better understand the unique aspects of serving an individual with both hearing and visual disabilities. They have completed a survey of ten of the 34 current customers and are scheduling listening sessions into 2026 to identify issues and make recommendations.

Concurrently, DSB staff have organized a Deaf-Blind Consortium, which is bringing together a wide array of service providers who interact with the Deaf-Blind community. In 2025 the partners shared in depth each organization’s role and scope and developed pathways for better coordinating services. The Consortium will continue into 2026, building on the connections made in 2025.

More direct support of participants with job readiness, job placement, and communication with employers to support an individual’s success on the job, with engagement and support of each unique path towards a career

The Business Relations team was expanded in 2024 and has been “Baking It In” over 2025. As noted, there was a remarkable increase in services to businesses this past year, an 800% increase in documented services over 2024.

The Business Relations team has developed pathways for accessible job readiness trainings through the WorkSource American Jobs Center WIOA partners which had not existed before this year. The Strategies for Success six-week interactive workshop was made accessible for individuals who are blind, deafblind or low vision, and there has been enthusiastic feedback from DSB customers who attended the pilot programs. We are excited to expand this model in 2026.

The Business Relations Team developed Service Menus for the vocational rehabilitation teams to understand what services they can provide to a career-seeking customer and what stage in their vocational rehabilitation progress various services might make most sense in seamlessly preparing the customer for their job search.

The Business Relations Team has brought businesses and hiring entities into the agency to educate DSB staff and customers as to current recruitment expectations, processes and workplace cultural considerations. Internal job clubs and other workshops have been pioneered to meet the customer job readiness needs.

DSB offices have developed monthly peer support groups where customers in the job search phase mingle with peers who are employed and active in their careers to share experiences and insight.

Offices actively support customer engagement with the two consumer organizations for the peer connections that can boost the self-advocacy and self-belief that is essential in getting and keeping a career.

Advocating for inclusion of younger youth

DSB regained the ability to serve customers of all ages by securing state general funding that supports activities and services for blind youth ages birth through 13, and their families.

The Explorers Program, as the Birth through 13 program is called, has served 79 individuals in its first full year. Peer connections, education and skills building activities have been developed, such as the monthly Parent Connection Zoom sessions with a twelve-hour course provided by vision professionals and blind community members. Bringing youth together who are blind, deafblind or low vision is a critical aspect of the Explorers programming, to reduce potential isolation and to develop peer connections whether through attending sports activities, adapted self-defense classes, Family Jam overnight activities, exploring careers or learning skills.

The Explorers programming acts as a gateway to connecting youth to the Pre-Employment Transition Services and application for vocational rehabilitation services when they reach their 14th birthday.

Enhancing accessibility services that include digital and assistive technology, and training participants to ensure technology solutions work

DSB added capacity for an Accessibility Coordinator in the agency’s Information Technology Department, and they have been active in identifying and correcting internal gaps in accessibility in our communications, forms and website, as well as supporting other businesses and agencies in providing training and resources for their own ability to identify and correct accessibility issues.

This staff is active in fostering and supporting the state enterprise through active participation in Accessibility Communities of Practice and active mentoring of peer IT staff. The focus is to provide services that lead to self-sufficiency. With the addition of this position, the agency is much more accessible for all customers and staff, and the state enterprise becomes more of a career option for the agency career-seeking customers because of the increased and more consistent digital accessibility structures.

2025 has been an active year

There have been many challenges that we have faced as an agency over the past year, and so many triumphs. I am proud and grateful of the care and dedication DSB staff give to our customers – both the career-seeking customer with a disability as well as the business customer.

DSB staff carry a drive to support individuals to find new ways of interacting with an environment that is built for sighted people and can create obstacles for people who are blind, deafblind or low vision.  DSB staff thrill when a customer discovers a higher sense of self-belief and confidence in managing that environment with greater independence, and when a customer’s belief in what they can do as a blind individual suddenly blooms into a new universe of possibilities once they have gained some adaptive skills of blindness. We are honored and blessed to work in a field where individuals discover daily how much more they can do than they might have thought and then discover even more possibility.

I am grateful to the active dedication and partnership we have engaged in with the State Rehabilitation Council - Blind; our federal RSA partners; the DSHS Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR); the 29 federally recognized tribes and the ten Tribal Vocational Rehabilitation partners in the region; the Washington State School for the Blind (WSSB); the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library (WTBBL); the consumer organizations National Federation of the Blind – Washington (NFBW) and the Washington Council of the Blind (WCB); the Washington State Workforce and Education Board and WIOA partners; of the community in general; of the customers past and present who have offered insight and feedback. And so many more! We as an agency recognize we can’t achieve what we need to for our customers without a broad network of support and coordination.

Having such strong community connections and such incredibly dedicated staff, I feel confident that 2026 will be another year of great achievement for our career-seeking and business customers.

Respectfully,

Michael MacKillop

Executive Director