Did you ever hear of the old Sheltered Workshop on Mount Desert Island? It started in Bar Harbor in 1975, moved to Otter Creek and finally – renamed the MDI Workshop – moved to a big new building on Route 3. As many as 25 to 30 mentally retarded and developmentally disabled people have been making chairs and stools and other products for sale at the shop. For a while, they also made model-ship kits for the WoodenBoat Co. in Brooklin and ventilation-filter shields for mouse cages at The Jackson Laboratory.

Well, the workshop is closing at the end of June. That means folks will no longer be able to buy furniture there and at the same time feel that they are helping the handicapped. And the disabled will no longer be working at the state-of-the-art machines. But this is good news, and here’s why:

Times have changed, and the workshop organization is changing, too. For years, the system of segregating people with disabilities from the rest of society has come under question. Like the Iris Network in Portland, where in-house broom making by the blind has given way to training them for outside jobs, the workshop began helping people with mental disabilities to move out into the job market.

Instead of running a woodworking shop and retail store, Director Rick Sprague and his staff are gradually finding places for people who are mentally handicapped in the mainstream work force. Some are already at work in area restaurants and supermarkets and a local garden nursery. Mr. Sprague says that one longtime furniture maker, devastated when he learned that the workshop would soon close, has now gotten a job at a nearby metal-fabricating shop “and never looks back.”

Finances are a continuing problem. The overall organization, Downeast Horizons, gets most of its support from federal Medicaid dollars and must describe its functions to conform with official guidelines. Maine’s congressional delegation could help by working to change current rules to set aside a portion of Medicaid funds specifically for placing and assisting handicapped people in the mainstream work force.

Mr. Sprague, who has been with the workshop from the start and knows each worker as an individual, sees the changing role as positive for both the people with handicaps and also for the general public. He reaffirms the idea that as folks get to know such people, they will find that “they are more like us than they are different.”