By Michelle Graff - Marietta Daily Journal Staff Writer

AUSTELL - Formerly known as the South Cobb Mental Retardation Services Center, the Staff Resources and Support Services Center on Veterans Highway in Austell provides job training and support for those with physical and mental disabilities. The SRSS is a function of the Cobb and Douglas Community Services Boards,which provide mental health, mental retardation and substance abuse services to more than 11,000 residents of Cobb and Douglas counties annually. Until artist Jim Slattery's arrival at the SRSS a year and half ago, the job training did not extend beyond simple contract work, such as assembling newborn information packets for nearby hospitals.

With the arrival of this Wisconsin-born artist to SRSS, however, the painting of kiln-fired pottery and the creation of watercolors replaced stuffing envelopes with brochures and fliers. "This is more to the creative side," Slattery said, as he stood in front of someone molding a coil pot made out of clay atop a paint-splattered table. It allows them to be independent in a lot of different textures," he said.

"[It's] the success of seeing something from a real effort." Near the front of the assembly-factory-turned-art studio sits a table covered with colorful handmade windsocks and painted cookware, all products of the consumers who work at the center. A paper price tag affixed to one of the large serving platters advertises its worth at $20.

Slattery said the profits earned from the sale of the art replaces the money consumers used to earn from the sub-minimum wage contract work once done at the center. Nancy Brooks, director of the mental retardation/developmentally disabled department of the board, elaborates on the changes made at SSRS beginning in July 2000. "We felt it didn't provide any value for the individual," she said of the piece-rate work performed in the past. "What we are trying to do is increase the focus for the individual." She said other changes to the center included the addition of a computer lab, where consumers learn job skills for placement into white-collar professions. "It's opened up doors to people who had been very slighted in terms of using technology to their own enhancement," Ms. Brooks said.

She said Slattery, who started similar programs in north Georgia and at the Holy Comforter Church in Atlanta, was hired by the board with the change in mind. Raised in orphanages and foster homes in Madison, Wis., Slattery was diagnosed as developmentally disabled at an early age because he did not speak in full sentences and was placed in special education classes. "They didn't know a lot about that stuff [at the time]," said 50-year-old Slattery.
Bored with the slow pace of the classes, he skipped school and headed to the pottery kiln in the art room, or to the library. "That's where this all began," he said of his interest in art.

It was not until long after high school that Slattery was given the correct diagnosis for the condition once perceived as mental retardation. At age 26, he was diagnosed as manic depressive and at 37, it was found that Slattery had visual and verbal dyslexia that prevented him from speaking in full sentences. He battled back from both, enrolling in speech classes and medicating his manic depression. "These are my people," he said of the consumers at the SSRS. "I was treated as though I was mentally retarded at an early age, and I carried that stigma with me all through high school."

He said he also was afflicted with the stigma of being manic depressive. He now takes pride in his work at the center, where stereo-types about the ability of developmentally disabled people are broken everyday. "A lot of my life has been about stigma-busting," he said. "Stigmas are just people's inability to understand people who are different from them."