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Transcript of NTA Conference Call Presentation held on 08/19/97

Quality Work-Based Learning in New York State

Presented by

Debra A. Colley, Coordinator
Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities (VESID), New York State Department of Education

Nancy Lauria, Associate
VESID, New York State Department of Education

Thomas Golden
Southern Tier Transition Coordination Site, Cornell University

Debra Colley (VESID): My role on this call is, as Mary said, to give a little bit of the background. We're delighted to have the opportunity to talk to other folks about what we're doing in school-to-work and how we've made some of that happen, because it is one of the areas that we believe represents a very strong collaboration with colleagues across a number of different agencies, offices, and organizations. And without that collaboration, I don't think we would be able to get the job done for students with disabilities.

New York State is in the fourth year of its school-to-work systems change grant. We've already completed our five-year systems change grant on transition services. I want to mention Cynthia Laks - she couldn't be on line right now - she's the coordinator of School-to-Work for New York State. Her office is in Elementary/Middle/Secondary Education in the State Education Department and we work very closely with her and her staff to make all of these things happen. It has truly been a collaborative effort. She would have been delighted to be online if today was a good day for her outside of her vacation.

Let me start off with a little of the systems piece. In New York State, the Office of Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities (VESID) is responsible for administering all of the disability programs and services from age three through employment and independent living. We administer special education, vocational rehabilitation, independent living. We connect with the department of health for early intervention and transitioning kids into school age programs. So we have the opportunity to pull together the resources and programs across the life span, and we've been doing business that way since we started our transition systems change grant in 1990. We looked at the continuum of services that would lead to something different going on at the secondary level, and then increase success for individuals with disabilities when they left school. At the end, we have focused on increasing the results in post-secondary settings, employment, the use of GED in adult education programs, and in independence, generally. We sit on the New York State Advisory Council, and we've been a member right from the beginning. In fact, one of the neat things that happened for us is that we were able to bring what we were learning from the transition systems change grant to the table as the school-to-work people were shaping the direction that they were going to go in New York State. Our representation on the council is for both special education and vocational rehabilitation, so we've been able to bring both of those systems in.

I want to highlight just a couple of results that we're seeing, then move into some specific examples and initiatives across the state. Last year we did a post-school indicator study where we surveyed quite a number of former students. Seven hundred and twenty of them were students with disabilities who had exited special education, and the rest of the students were from general education, so that we could have somewhat of a comparison. We found some really interesting things. Among the 720 students who had left special education, about 64% of them, after they left school, were either working or in post-secondary education, primarily going to college. Another 16% were seeking jobs, and we feel that's a critical issue that needs to be addressed through the school-to-work initiative. Out of that 64% of students, 46% were working, and most of them were working full time, they were earning above minimum wage salaries, and they were quite happy with their jobs. The neat thing is that when we asked students what were the things that made the biggest difference in getting a job and feeling good about that job, they sited work experiences, vocational education, those kinds of things, regardless of what they called it, but their experience in work prior to leaving the secondary setting made a big difference for them, whether they went to college or went to work. And we've been using that kind of data to help us expand the school-to-work programs across the state. We've brought this information to the council, and it's really helped to shape the evaluation that they're going to do state-wide. In terms of going to college, a lot the students who were going to college were studying things like business administration, arts and sciences, some of the areas that we're bringing to the table to see how that fits in with the career majors and some of the other things that we're working on before kids gets out of school. You could imagine that students with disabilities were not doing as well as former general education students. As we evaluate the work going on through our systems change and school-to-work initiatives, we're talking to people about making sure not only that all students are participating, but that we're raising the expectations for all those kids, so that we don't end up saying that particular groups participate and go to college, and other groups of students are involved in school-to-work and they just end up getting a job, so that we can keep pressing people as far as we can go.

The other thing is that last year the VR program placed over 16,000 people in jobs, most of which were competitive jobs, and those numbers have been going up dramatically over the last number of years. We believe that the work being done in the school-to-work and transition services area has contributed to that, because we're finding people coming to the VR office more prepared to go to work. They've been thinking about it in school, they have experiences that they can bring to that vocational training situation, and therefore become employed and really end up with better jobs than they had before.

One of the things that we've done to make all of this link together is that we've been able to fund our transition coordination sites. New York state has eight transition coordination sites that were established as part of our systems change initiative for transition services, and we decided that we needed these places across the state that could work directly with schools, community agencies, and students and their families, to bring all of these parts together that relate to transition. Well, when we had to develop a staff development plan for school-to-work, we said, "We already have the expertise." And you're going to hear from Tom Golden who is at one of those sites. We really had identified the spark plugs in the state that were out there doing what needed to be done and really learning about the whole process as they went along. Those sites have become part of the school-to-work staff development network in New York state. They assist with the development of materials, guides, resources for the field, and they've been meeting with all of the local partnerships to find out what's going on in their area in terms of involving students with disabilities, how is that working, what do we need to do it, and how can we support that effort happening more than they had before. I'm happy to say that last week, the people in the School-to-Work Office were compiling all this information about the results of the staff development network, and the first time in my career here in the disability field, they told me we had too much stuff about special education, because of all of the training and staff development going on. They were finding that what was most effective is what we were doing with the sites, in terms of working with the partnerships to include students with disabilities. And the field was talking about that part of it more than any of the other pieces of the staff development that they had been receiving. To me that was great, because that is a level of awareness that we didn't have before, and it demonstrates the collaboration that we have, and the movement that we have in going forward. So with that in mind, I would like to turn it over to Nancy Lauria and she's going to talk about specific initiatives that have been going on.

Nancy Lauria (VESID): Debra mentioned the transition sites, and that's been an integral piece of what we've been doing in New York State with the partnerships and work-based learning activities. For instance, I'm going to give you a couple of examples and then I'm going to turn it over to Thomas, because I'd like to get into specifics and our time is limited. We have a North Country Transition Implementation Services Team. Our North Country is mostly the Adirondack State Park, so you have to understand townships and people are few and far between. Over two hundred people showed up for our conference that our transition coordination sites spearheaded with this team of people. It's an interagency network of schools, colleges, agencies and community providers, and they all work together to A) bring in special and general education program representatives who are doing work-based learning and B) to demonstrate effective practices that could be replicated. The whole purpose of the conference was to share between special and general educators so that they could find out what each other is doing and start coordinating better. It was a great success. There's been all kinds of positive response and people have asked that we do it another year. Another kind of activity that we've been doing that one of our sites has been responsible for is working with one of the Tech Prep grants at a community college working with students that are part of the Tech Prep program. Some are special education students, some are general education students. They're working on design kinds of things: they're developing milk cartons, templates, place mats, and other pieces of media that can be used to tell parents and families about school-to-work, to get them more involved in the effort, because that's one of our main focuses of the school-to-work grant this year. To help do that, our sites are giving out mini-grants with some of their money to family networks and partnerships that are working together to get parents more involved, and they're going to be using some of the materials developed by the Tech Prep program.

Another activity that was really exciting was on Long Island. There's a place called the River Head Foundation for Marine Preservation and Research which is working with sea turtles and other marine animals to help those who have been wounded or hurt in some way. They have an information and tourist center where they sell souvenirs. Several students with disabilities have been going out there to work, set up by the school-to-work coordinators. When the students first got there and the staff found out they had disabilities, they started talking to them about clean-up and yard maintenance and the coordinator said, "No, no, that's not what we discussed." Well, as it turns out, it's been very successful. The students are doing a whole range of things from setting up displays, to ordering stock, running the cash register, working with customers and doing bookkeeping. It's such a positive thing that they've asked to have more students involved another year.

So those are just a small sample of the kinds of activities we've got going on in New York State that involve students with disabilities and work-based learning. We've also developed some materials, as Debra talked about, includes their work-based learning manual in New York State on different types of work-based learning activities. One of the chapters of this manual is on supported employment strategies, and how those can be used for all students, not just for those with disabilities. Thomas worked on that, and also worked with other staff at Cornell University to develop a manual called Creating Supportive Work-Based Learning Environments, which is to be used in conjunction with the Work-based Learning Manual. It has some specific kinds of things that employers can do to accommodate individuals with disabilities in the workplace.

Right now, I'd like to introduce Thomas Golden, who's our Southern Tier Transition Coordination Site Administrator, with the program on Unemployment and Disability at the School of Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell University. Thomas is going to talk about some specific things around work-based learning. Thomas.

Thomas Golden (Southern Tier Transition Coordination Site): Thank you, Nancy. It's a pleasure to speak to you today about some of the things that we've been doing here in New York State. What I'm going to try to do is to get a little bit more down to the grass roots level, specifically about what we've been doing to create supportive work-based learning environments in New York State. Our approach has been over the last few years, I think I would probably take it back a little farther than Dr. Colley did, back to our supported employment systems change grant that we had several years ago. In this state, we really began to take much more of a functional supports look at individuals, versus the typical continuum model that we have seen in many states, and as a national trend, if you will, over the last twenty to thirty years. The focus we've taken has really been a shift for us in New York State, because it's a focus away from looking at prerequisites, continuum focus services, deficit-based service delivery plans, and plans where we looked at controlling behavior instead of taking a look at what environmentally may be causing the behavior. And in our state we've really shifted from a systems-centered approach to much more of a person-centered approach to working specifically with students with disabilities as we have attempted to put them successfully into work-based learning environments that resulted in their successful employment as adults. This evolution of systems change grants in our state has really assisted in modifying the driving principles and foundation, if you will, of our service delivery. And basically we are defining quality work-based learning environments as work-based learning environments that are really dictated by our students' interests and preferences. What is it that that student wants to do, what is it that is of most interest to them, what supports do they see themselves needing in pursuing those types of goals. And then actually assisting schools and communities as a whole in developing both systemic, as well as individual goals that assists the student in moving towards their desired outcomes. And all along that way, the emphasis of us in New York State, as well as part of our special education reform in our state, is really to take a look at how we can empower students through this process, how we can assist them in becoming more self determined, better able to advocate for themselves as they proceed towards adulthood in living and working in the community. And finally that quality process or the consumer's satisfaction is really dictated by what did we help them achieve, what was it that they said they wanted from the beginning, and at the end of this child's academic program where we are able to deliver that, and has it resulted in tangible long term adult outcomes in the realm of employment, post-secondary education, or community living.

One of the first lessons I think that we learned from the get-go is that quality has to be a process for all, it can't be quality just coming from the school district, the community service provider, or the employer. It really is a three dimensional process that incorporates all of the key stakeholders. And I just want to take a moment to walk you through what that process looks like, and we're more than happy to take questions as we come to the end.

For those of you that are listening, I want you to just take out a piece of paper, I don't know how you all can do this type of learning without having paper and pen to doodle! I'm going to try help you draw some graphics, hopefully that will help cement some of the stuff that I'm talking about, and give you a visual in front of you. But what I want you to do is turn that piece of paper lengthwise. On the far left hand side, draw your best attempt at a stick figure, or a person, because the first dimension of this process of creating real successful and effective work-based learning environments is to focus on that individual that we're developing it for. And what we've recognized is that work-based learning environments are as individualized as the students that are going to be assigned to them. And students are going to have unique vocational interests. One student I know that we were working with wanted to be working in fiber optics. Now that's not typically a work-based environment that you have developed contacts for, even in your back pocket, that you can pull out. Those kinds of students really posed some interesting challenges to us that are trying to create these types of environments.

So I want to walk us through a process by which we first identify what that student wants, focusing on the individuals. When we talk about focusing on them here, we're talking about a data-collection process. Now notice I use the word 'collection' here, not 'creation,' because I think a lot of times in order to get students with disabilities into an effective work-based learning environment, we really need to focus our efforts on creating new data about them. And my experience has been that if that data typically exists, we've just not been real good at finding that. So the first step is really getting to know the individual, or that student that you're working with, identifying their ability, and trying to capture a little bit better what some of their existing support needs might be. These might be some questions that you want to write around that stick figure that you've just drawn. What is it that the student wants, what are their long-term adult outcomes in regard to employment or career pursuits that are of particular interest to them? Does it involve post-secondary education or adult educational training? And then trying to get a better idea of what it is that's guiding them. What are the student's dreams? A lot of times we've found students have made career choices, but the career choices that they've made have been based on a fairly limited repertoire of experiences, so they're making decisions based on, "Well, my mom did this... my dad did that... my aunt had this career...." And what we've found is that it is real important to get a better understanding of where those dreams and aspirations are coming from, because that's the first clue to the type of work-based learning environment that we might want to create. If it is a student that has a real limited repertoire of work experiences and limited exposure to the world of work, then their work-based learning environment is going to look very different from the learning environment of a student who may have very refined career choices that have a definite singular area of pursuit that they're going to want to follow.

Next thing that we take a look at is what is that person good at, what are their abilities? Now, this is where we really deviate, I think, a great deal in our state from what we've done in the past, because often we've seen our education systems and even some of voc ed rehab systems focusing very much on what it is a person can't do. The reality is that we've all learned that we work within deficit-based systems, and the dollars flow from what the person has wrong with them. What we've learned is that we can't do a lot to build a program on what a person can't do, but we can build a program on what a person can do. That's the part that we'll begin to gather a lot of data, as to what it is that this individual can do, what have they done in the past that they've been successful at, what types of environments were they in when they've been successful, the types of people that they've worked with. What does the person dislike, what is it that the person absolutely doesn't want to do with their life? I've seen a lot of individuals in a lot of schools that we've worked with that have done a real good job of asking some of these functional supports questions right up front, and they'll ask the student, "What is it that you don't want to do?" And they'll state very thoroughly, "I don't want to clean, I don't want to work in a grocery store." But when you go a few years into the future in their records, you'll see that those are the environments that the kids are placed in because of what was readily available. Now if we tie back to our quality formula that we talked about earlier, quality in the students' satisfaction is based on what it is that we're able to deliver based on what it is the students said they wanted. So it's real important that up front, when we quantify what it is that the person dislikes, that we very seriously take that into consideration and don't just put that on a form somewhere that gets lost in a file. Some other just quick questions include, "How does the person define quality?" Now we don't often take the time to focus on this. When we talk about how a person defines quality in regard to their job situation, we're talking about indices, such as how many hours a week do you want to work, what type of pay do you want, what is the benefits package going to look like, what are those co-workers going to act like, how are you going to dress? Those indices we found to be very important to structuring and developing that work-based and learning environment for the student with a disability. What does a student need to achieve their desired outcomes? That's another very important question. Now I'm not asking you as that educator or that rehab service provider to tell me that, I'm asking you to find out from the student what they feel they need to achieve their desired outcomes. That will give us a lot of very important information as to where the student is in regard to his own professional development. If s/he's stating an interest in wanting to be a doctor, but it's an individual who's typically done very poor academically, or has not shown or demonstrated a lot of capacity in the sciences, and yet the student doesn't recognize the need to improve those scores or become more involved in science programs, then that really begins to dictate and help us to identify some potential goals that we're going to need to work on to help increase the student's awareness of what types of supports they're going to need to have in place to pursue their vocational interest area.

Other questions that we want to take a look at, maybe that don't focus so much on work, but I think that are just as important to the processes. Where does that person want to live, where does the person want to work, where are they going to be located, what types of family and social connections does the person desire as they proceed through their life. Now these might not be specific to work-based learning, but when we talk about the bigger picture of transition planning, these are just natural questions that we're asking as a result of that process that we should be taking a look at as we begin to develop a career plan for the student we're going to be working with.

As we begin to get a better feel of where the student wants to go, that gives us our baseline and the starting point in the student's career portfolio from which we're going to go forward. Now that doesn't tell you anything how John is going to do working down at the local giant or working as an opthamology assistant intern downtown at the local hospital, but it does give you an idea about the deck of cards that you have to work with as you begin to think about those creative and effective work-based learning environments you might begin to structure for the student.

That's typically the process that we're using. Now that's been mandated a couple of different ways for us in our state. As part of our special education law in New York State, schools are required to do different types of assessment. And for those of you that may be interested, those assessments have been written into our state special education law and focus very much on the areas that we've talked about already. So this is natural data that's already being collected as part of our education program here in New York State.

What's real important is what we do with that information, how we compile it, and how we use the information that we found out to describe the person that we're going to be working with. And often in the past we've really put much too strong a focus on labels. My experience has been as a person that's been out there developing work-based learning environments, is that labels don't tell me a lot about what John and Mary are going to be able to do once I get them out there. The fact that they have a label of schizophrenia or mild mental retardation or hyperactivity doesn't really tell me a lot about how they're going to perform. And so what we've learned as a result of really looking at how we've described people in the past is that we need to focus our efforts on seeing the person first. What their skills capacities are, what their social networks are comprised of right now, what effective support systems have already been in place for this student, and what has made them effective, so that we can build on that. Real good descriptions of this person from people that know them, such as their families, their friends and other stakeholders in their life. We need to begin to capture the whole community context of who John and Mary are, and what their role is in their community right now where they are.

I want you now to go over to that right side of your paper and talk a little about the second dimension of this process. I want you to draw as best you can a factory or something that in your mind symbolizes a place of employment, because the second dimension of the process is identifying potential workplaces for the student. It's important to recognize from the beginning that workplaces are comprised of three specific parts, according to ecology of the workplace theory. You can toss it out if you want, but my experience is that it has been helpful in making good matches between students and workplaces. That workplace that you're developing right now has three features.

1. The first is the physical ecology: how it looks, how it's laid out, how the environment feels as you walk into it, from a physical perspective.
2. The second is feature is the social ecology: who makes it up, what's the work culture comprised of, who are those co-workers, what types of experiences have they had.
3. And then finally, the organizational ecology, which I'm going to talk about from a couple different perspectives, including the basic organization - what is the internal communication strategy there, what's management structure like, how does work flow - and also, the general needs of that employer, the ongoing human resources development needs that that company or business may have.

Now when we talk now about getting a good idea of the workplace, we have to look at those three things.

PHYSICAL ECOLOGY

The first thing that I want to focus on is that physical ecology. Some of these you want to take into consideration as you're developing some of these supportive work-based learning environments for students with disabilities. Now I'm just not talking here about targeting, and doing what we call preening, taking the students with disabilities that have marginal support needs. Here I'm talking now about kids that typically have not had exposure to work-based learning environments, because of their academic programming or because traditionally those types of opportunities have just not been available for students with more severe disabilities. But the physical ecology of the workplace is essential to understand and to assess, and there are a lot of different tools out there that can help you do that. When your job developers or marketing specialists are going out there to create relationships with business, they may be using things like a business profile, an environmental analysis form, there are lots of different tools out there that you can use. Basically, they're looking at how the place looks, is it accessible, is their signage in the building, what is reaching and pulling like in there. It's getting the real specifics as to physically what a person's going to need to be able do to get in the environment and to maneuver in the environment so that work can be performed at a quality level as dictated by the employer.

SOCIAL ECOLOGY

Now the social ecology tends to be, in my eyes, a little bit more difficult to grasp on, because a lot of our recent supported employment research has shown us that individuals with more significant with disabilities are not leaving the job sites or failing in the job site, because they've not been able to do the task, but because they've not been appropriately assimilated within the work environment itself. And what that tells me is that we've basically not done a good job in the past of helping workers become owned by the workplace, if you will. And we've been focusing our efforts on trying to get a better feel for what the work-culture is. Who are those people that work there, what do they look like, how do they dress, what is their language like, what is space like around them, what types of leadership styles do we see, and what are relationships like between co-workers, is there a cohesiveness, is there a scapegoat mentality, who is in charge, what types of status do people have, is it perceived status, or is it self-described status, who makes decisions, what is the humor like, or there tricks-of-the-trade that we need to know about, are there certain eating customs, do they celebrate birthdays, is somebody responsible for bringing donuts in. A lot of this stuff may sound trivial, but what we found through our experience is that this type of information is essential to helping people "fit in" to the workplace itself. And I've not seen a real good tool, but hopefully during our question and answer period, if some of you are using some good work culture assessment tools, you'll share that with us. My experience has been work culture assessment is best done through observation and taking lots of notes. Now keep in mind when you're doing those work culture assessments, though, and trying to get a better feel for the work environment itself, know that any time that you insert something that doesn't belong into an environment, people are going to act a little differently. That's just basic organizational behavior. And so it's important that when you're doing work culture assessment, that you are just not using, as your sole source of information, your observations from standing in the middle of the work floor and turning three hundred and sixty degrees around. So watch what people are doing, because more than likely that intrusive approach is going to impact the reliability and the validity of the information that you're going to get. So take a look at some other ways of collecting it, talk to co-workers, get a feel from them about their work environment, their experiences. Using some multi-model approaches, you're get much more and better information about the work environment itself.

ORGANIZATIONAL ECOLOGY

That final aspect of the work environment when you take a look at is the organizational ecology. What's real important to keep in mind here folks, is that when we're taking a look that helping a person assimilate into a work environment, specifically a student with a disability, there are four levels of integration that you need to be sensitive to here.

The first is physical integration, we've done pretty good at that I think on a national level, and that's just basically getting those students with disabilities out of the classroom and into work environment. We've done a much better job of that in the past five years than we've ever done in our history.

The next level of integration we're just now doing a little bit better job of, and that's social integration. Helping that person become acquainted and familiar with those other peers within that work environment, so that those co-workers see that individual with disability as a co-worker, as well. That they don't see you as the job coacher, you as the training specialist, or you as the special education teacher as the person that they're going to maintain the relationship with. So social integration is critical.

Third aspect of integration is relationships, and what we're talking about here is relationships that are valued, where people within a work site write the student with a disability into their work stories, where they become full contributing members of the workplace.

And finally social networks, and what we're talking about here is reciprocal relationships, where individuals actually maintain relationships with individuals that they work with outside of the workplace. Now, I'm not saying here that all students with disabilities need to achieve this fourth level of integration, because the reality is some people don't like to socialize and maintain reciprocal relationships with their co-workers, but when we talk about the four levels of integration, it's important to recognize those four aspects exist.

Finally, I want to talk about the last dimension of this process that we've established in New York State and are following. And the third and final aspect is really the assessment between the two environments. And on your piece of paper there, I want you to draw a two-sided arrow between the person and the workplace and put a great big dark circle around it, because the third piece is really what is essential to creating supportive work-based learning environments. We need to contrast and compare the two pieces that we've already looked at, that being what John can do, what are all of his skills, what are his capacities, what are his experiences that he's bringing to this work-based environment. And then on the flip side of that, over on the employer side, what is it that this job requires, what does the environment require, what physically must a person be able to do, what does the culture require, what types of people fit in best to this work environment. And then finally what are the specific and essential job functions that a person needs to be able to perform to be considered a qualified individual with a disability within the environment. Now when you've got those two lists, the assessment occurs between the middle, because what we're able to do then is take a look at what it is that John can do and what it is that job, environment, and culture are requiring, and begin to identify where holes exists. Now, those support holes are the keys. Those are the areas that as effective school-to-work providers, if you will, are catalysts. We need to be looking at assisting the employer in managing diversity. Now, those supports can be provided in a multitude of ways. Keep in mind supports can be verbal, physical, social, promotional, the list goes on and on for what supports can be. The key here is to assist that person and also to assist that employer in recognizing that these support needs exist, and then coming together to have a dialogue and discussion about the best way to meet those. Our experience has been, in many cases, that employers are the most willing to provide those supports, because they say things like, "Oh, that's existed for somebody else that we've worked with." In many cases, you're going to go through this process and find that there aren't support needs. You've done such a good job of matching the two that support needs aren't any longer an issue.

I'm just going to close with a scenario of a gentleman that I worked with a few years ago, Jimmy, who's labeled with a diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome. Tourette Syndrome demonstrates itself very interestingly in some cases. In Jimmy's case, Jimmy had excessive clicks, as well as inability to control some of his lexical selection. For lack of better words, he swore uncontrollably, which posed quite a few barriers to us in assimilating him into any workplace that was going to see him as a valued member. He's a person that we've struggled with for over eighteen months, figuring out what we're going to do with this guy. He had an interest in production type work, working with a large local manufacturer, that we had a great deal of difficulty getting into. Jimmy was not an individual that we were really thinking about placing there, given that we didn't have a strong reputation with the organization itself to begin with. Of course we wanted to place our best individuals there to have some success that we can build on. Eighteen months later, taking a tour of the factory, we took a tour of a whole brand new area that they'd just developed, and there was a secluded room way in the back that was an antistatic room. That's basically a room where you get clipped with different attachments, you wear an antistatic garb, you go through double locked security, and you enter this room that's fairly sterile. Interestingly enough now, when we toured this room, the minute that we opened the second door, the culture that had evolved in this room was basically the place where they had outplaced some people off the industrial assembly line, people who had very poor language, a fun bunch of people, but many people on the larger work floor found them disruptive and found it difficult to work with them. So as we entered the room, we were met with words like I had never heard before, and various statements that would probably be deemed inappropriate in any other work environment. And it was at that point that we began to explore with that employer the possibility of this being an environment that could sustain the unique support needs that Jimmy had in regard to finding people that were not offended by some of words that he said, but also that might even embrace his ability to swear with the best of them, if you will. Jimmy's been employed there now for almost eight years now, and is in a midline management position. Interestingly enough, another service provider had done a disability sensitivity training and needs assessment with that large employer, and it actually coded the surveys that were done for other employees in that room, whereby each of them had identified that never in their lives had they worked with an individual with a disability.

I think that's the key to creating successful work environments - finding those environments that are conducive to the support needs of the people that we're trying to work with and that we're trying to place, so that their ability is maximized to the extent that disability is not prevalent, and that support needs are provided to the extent that none remain that are left unmet, either naturally or from an externally imposed support system, like a service provider in the community. That's our three dimensional approach, there's a lot more that I'm sure that we could share and maybe can do so by taking some of the questions that you all may have.

Participant: This is Roy Kimble from Texas. Dr. Colley, I missed the first few minutes of your presentation. How are the centers, the sites that you referred to, how are they funded?

Debra Colley: They're funded through two different sources really. They were primarily funded through the state systems change grant on transition services, and when that grant was completed we continued funding them through special education discretionary moneys, and now they're also funded through the school-to-work moneys that are coming to New York State from that systems change initiative. So they really have two sources of funding coming in.

It was interesting what had happened to us in New York State, because we were able to get things going through the systems change project on secondary and transition services, and I imagine a lot of the folks are in the middle of that project, as well. What we found is because we had made such a difference with some of the sites and activities under that grant, it actually became almost a matter of the way that we do business now, that when we're looking at allocations from our federal dollars, that transition is really built right into there. And to me that was evidence of systems change, where before that project we were fighting for little pieces of this and that. Now transition services and school-to-work are basically interchangeable to us at this point in time, and it's one of the major goals of the office. We have performance indicators and that has really made it a lot easier, for me anyway, to secure dollars from the money that the office has, and then the relationship that we established with school-to-work just came about because we were in the business and doing great stuff. After they got to know the sites, people like Tom, and you can imagine how easily this worked once they met these people, they said, "Wow, this is an invaluable resource for us." They've funded them two years in a row now and we would expect that to continue until we finished with that grant, as well. Hopefully by then we could figure out a way to build it into the way that we just do business here.

Participant: This is Joan McArthur from Wisconsin. I have a rather general question. In collecting your data, how do your benchmarks define the young people with disabilities. Are you using a federal definition, or what?

Debra Colley: Most of things that I've mentioned before were students who had been receiving special education services. So in that regard, we are using the federal definition from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). In New York State, we also have kids with disabilities, obviously like everyone does, who are not receiving special ed services. We're trying to include those, as well, but most of the data that we're talking about when we say students with disabilities is generally defining these kids as those who are classified as eligible to receive special ed, and that would be based on the federal definition. New York State's is very similar. Does that answer you question?

Participant (Joan McArthur): Yes it did. Let me ask another question. Of the students that are participating in your work experience programs, what percentage of them are disabled?

Nancy Lauria: We've done some initial surveys that are samples, and what was found is about eight percent of the students sampled had a disability. The company that's doing our statewide assessment for school-to-work is checking for that information as they do their samples. At the current time, we're not talking about evaluating every student in every school-to-work program. We're doing samplings across the state based on urban, suburban, and rural high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools, and we're finding that of those students who have been sampled, it's seven to eight percent.

Debra Colley: But that may not include, if I can add, our traditional occupational education programs, because we have a lot more students than that participating in the traditional vocational education and occupation education. Nancy's talking about just those programs that are being administered and developed through the local partnerships from the School-to-Work Opportunities Act.

Mary Mack: Nancy, of those that were sampled, do know what the percentage of the general population were youth with disabilities?

Nancy Lauria: We have ten to twelve percent in New York State that have disabilities in K-12. Debra had mentioned the AgEd Program. We have about ten percent of the students in occupational education that have been classified. We collect that data and break it out between general ed and special ed kids. I think that's about average for the country, as well.

Mary Mack: Are there other questions?

Participant (Roy Kimble): What kind of business acceptance or direct business involvement on advisory committees or anything of that nature do you have?

Nancy Lauria: Our state advisory committee has employers and union representatives on it. Also, we have fifty local partnerships funded statewide which incorporates about eighty percent of the school districts in the state that are participating in school-to-work activities. And of those fifty partnerships, each one has to have an advisory board. We have eight different mandated members, and one of the members is a labor or union representative, and employer representatives. So we have employers on each of the advisory councils at the local partnership level. In addition, each partnership, when they turn in their application, has to have a letter of support from several different employers and in that letter of support, the employer doesn't just say, they support the effort. They have to demonstrate how the employer is going to be actively involved in the partnership. So we have very active involvement with employers. Also, our state business council is one of the co-chairs of our state advisory council.

Participant: This is Nancy Scher from New Jersey. Who is actually working with the students with disabilities in developing jobs. Is it the same person who's working with students without disabilities or are there people from voc rehab, special ed?

Debra Colley: There's all different models, it's such a big state. In some areas, the schools have people that are working on job development and outreach in the employment community. In examples like that, they're doing that for all of the kids, because one of the issues is everybody banging on the same employer door. In other areas, it's actually a partnership where somebody from special ed may be doing it, the special ed program may have a job developer that they fund through special ed, and they sort of link together with the general and vocational education folks. In other areas, in fact, I was just visiting one location where we were doing it from the VR end, so that we had a marketer, we call them employment specialists, and that employment specialist was working with the school and linking up so that they were all coordinating job development and job leads, and not working on it individually from each particular system. They really brought to the table all the information that people were working on, they shared job leads and some of those development activities. But we did have a VR person working with the school people. So I think we have a little bit of a variety of models for that.

Thomas Golden: I think I would add to that Deb, in the situations where we may have specialized personnel doing more job development activities for individuals with disabilities, I would say probably close to every county in our state is involved or tied in some way to a placement consortium, where there is shared job development that's going on, or shared leads, so that even in those cases where there's some specialized development, it's fairly closely tied to other placement efforts in each county.

Participant (Nancy Scher): How is the placement consortium organized? Who's sponsors that or is that the grass roots...?

Thomas Golden: I think it's done a couple of ways, and I'll just start with what I know, and then probably Dr. Colley and Nancy could even flush out a little bit more. For the most part, most of those placement consortiums were grass level operations where people were finding there was more than one person knocking on the door, and some placement people got together. However, I would say since the inception of that type of approach, probably close to over twelve years ago in our state, we've seen different funding occur for those. The most recent being our Developmental Disabilities Planning Council putting out a request for proposal to fund unique consortiums that might have a physical presence in high employment areas, such as malls, within larger communities. Dr. Colley or Nancy, do know of other ways that it's funded?

Debra Colley: I think that pretty much summarizes it. Some of them still work at a grass roots level, and what keeps them going are the collaborative results that they're getting. More people are getting jobs and employers almost have a single entry to find out what's needed and what the pool of possible workers might be and then they have difference streams come in, so I think you're summary of that, Tom, was perfect.

Mary Mack: I want to thank Dr. Colley, Nancy Lauria, and Tom Golden for presenting for us today. This has been a really exciting call with a lot of good information. Thank you very much for participating.

National Transition Alliance for Youth with Disabilities (NTA) conference call presentations are sponsored by the NTA and coordinated by the National Transition Network. For a copy of this or other transcripts, contact us at:

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URL: http://ici1.umn.edu/ntn/audio/1997/aug.html
Posted January 20, 1998
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