This text is meant to be
read continuously; however, you may select one of the
following sub-headings to move throughout the transcript
according to topic.
- Introduction
- Brief History of
Supported Employment
- Values-Based
Context
- Overview of
Supported Employment
- Models of Supported
Employment
- Assessment
- Evolution
of Supported Employment — Person-centered
Planning
- Scheduling
Considerations
- When to Offer
Supported Employment
- Length of Support
Services
- Staffing
- Outcomes
- Question & Answer
Session
- Person-Centered
Planning Related Websites
Dan Linneman: I would like to welcome you to
the National Transition Alliance March teleconference,
entitled Supported Employment Strategies for All
Youth.
Our speaker is Thomas Golden. He is on the program
teaching staff with the Program on Employment and
Disability in the School of Industrial Labor Relations at
Cornell University. Thomas has had hands-on and academic
experience working with both supported employment and
school-to-work opportunity systems.
This afternoon he will be presenting an overview of
supported employment, effective strategies to facilitate
employment, the maintenance of employment when the
support required is extensive, and how these strategies
relate to all students and the School-to-Work
Opportunities Act. Finally, Thomas will share some case
studies where these strategies have been successful and
effective. Thomas?
Thomas Golden: Thank you for the invitation to
talk with you today. We are going to talk about supported
employment, not so much as a model, but as some
strategies that we may be able to apply when working with
and supporting individuals that have traditionally been
under-served when it comes to providing community
integrated employment. Part of our delivery strategy that
we are going to be talking about today is how to do a
much better job early on with students with more severe
and significant disabilities and more extensive support
needs. I will also discuss how to begin delivery of some
up-front support and assessment services to really ensure
that we are identifying and matching students with
workplaces that minimize their disability while
maximizing their ability.
Supported employment really began in the mid-seventies
as a step in the evolution of our vocational
rehabilitation service delivery system to individuals
that experience severe disabilities and barriers which
have precluded participation in integrated community
employment opportunities. While supported employment was
really started and used with individuals labeled with
more severe disabilities in the 1970s, it is a field that
has really evolved into a way of identifying and
providing employment related support to anyone that might
need to ensure their job success.
Since it first started out, supported employment has
undergone numerous changes. Supported employment
strategies have been modified over the years to meet the
needs of people with mental illness, brain injury,
learning disabilities, and a whole array of other
disability populations that have typically not been
included. Current emphasis and importance is now on the
development and provision of individualized supports and
services within a values-based context.
When we talk about the values-based context of
supported employment, we are really talking about a way
of supporting individuals that is based primarily on what
their support needs are, not what their classification of
disability or the label of their disability is. For us to
make a statement like, “all individuals with x need
a, b, and c,” we are assuming that we are dealing
with a homogeneous disability group. What we do know
about disabilities is that they are not homogeneous.
Specific populations are comprised of individuals, and
those individuals really need, desire, and want
customized services and supports that lead them toward
employment.
Supported employment is federally defined and
targeted, as I said, for people with the most severe and
significant disabilities, accessing vocational
rehabilitation services under the Federal and State
Vocational Rehabilitation program. Supported employment
is actually defined in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
which was amended in 1998. Many of the strategies that
were developed initially in the early 1970s and utilized
over time have proven effective as a means to include
school-aged students with disabilities in work-based
learning activities and opportunities. What we have found
to be most exciting is that when we break supported
employment down as a model into the individual strategies
that make it up, we find woven throughout the model a
real structure for career planning that is not dissimilar
to what we are experiencing when we work with any student
regardless of disabilities as we are preparing them for
work as part of their secondary education program.
Supported employment provides community-based jobs and
supports, whether those supports are externally imposed
or naturally, within the workplace. Support services are
as individualized and extensive as are the needs of each
employer and employment candidate we will be supporting.
It is important to understand that supported
employment is federally defined as “competitive
employment in an integrated setting with ongoing support
services for individuals with the most severe
disabilities.” Now, for those of us that are working
in school-to-work programs, when we talk about ongoing
support services, we are not talking here about youth
that just need a little bit of help finding a job or need
a little vocational training and then they are able to
really sustain their work effort independently. We are
talking here about individuals that have traditionally
not been included within the workforce, because for
whatever reason we thought they could not work. Be it
that we thought that every job in the world required
people to work forty hours a week, or other
misperceptions regarding job readiness, we inadvertently
excluded certain populations of individuals with
disabilities from the workplace.
When you are looking at whether or not your
school-to-work program is incorporating supported
employment strategies, you want to ask yourself —
1) Are you targeting individuals with the most severe
disabilities?
2) Are you providing them with community-based
assessment and employment experiences?
3) Have you identified whether or not there is a need
for long-term, ongoing supports in that job setting? And,
if so, who might the provider of this long-term support
be?
That is an issue that we are going to discuss later
when we talk about staffing and also about program
design.
Basically, supported employment
is, as I said earlier, provided by somebody on site that
is either coming from the school or a local agency, or
coming internally from the employer's side, working
exclusively with supporting the student at the job site.
But primarily when we talk about supported employment, we
think of a model where a student is placed or supported
by a job coach or someone called an employment specialist
or consultant. These individuals provide an array of
community-based services to ensure that we have done a
good up-front job of assessing an individual's interest.
When we talk about job analysis, we are talking about
the work site. We are talking about taking a look at what
the essential functions are of certain jobs, what that
environment entails, what the work culture entails, and
then matching that with a consumer assessment. We need to
look at the student's interests and preferences, and
capabilities and capacities, and then figure out how we
are going to build on them.
Through this assessment process of looking at the
student's work-based learning experience, their
abilities, interests, and preferences, we really begin
what is called the job development process. This process
involves looking at where the student best fits in based
on their interests and preferences as well as the extent
to which the job site can support the individual. Some
other services that are included would be things like job
modification, systematic job instruction or job trading,
ongoing career development to look at promotional
opportunities, and follow along support services which
would be the long-term support mechanism that we had
talked about earlier.
These core services are provided within a competitive
employment arena using a variety of different models. So,
it's important to understand when we talk about supported
employment strategies that we are not just talking about
one way of placing an individual with a severe disability
into a job and supporting their career development. There
is a whole array of approaches that can be used.
What I just referred to is known more as an individual
placement model where you start with one student and
you really customize what that student's program is going
to look like.
Some other approaches that are probably more familiar
to you that maybe some of you are dabbling in are things
like mobile work crews where you've identified a
certain market need if you are in the community. Let's
say, for example, that you are in an area where there's a
lot of landscaping. You might design a mobile work crew
where you take a few individuals and establish a
community-run business where these individuals go around
the community marketing and providing that service.
Another model would be that of an enclave
where you've actually identified within a large industry
or corporation an array of jobs in a certain location or
disbursed throughout that location where you are able to
place an array of students and have one support person
there providing the supports needed.
And then, of course, you have more entrepreneurial or self-employment
business opportunities. This model entails taking a look
at the individual that has a specific interest in
cultivating their own business or employment based on
their skills or capacities or some service that they
think that they can market and make an income doing.
Supported employment services and supports can include
an array of different activities. When we talk about job
and task analysis, that's a real important tool, if you
will, for any quality school-to-work program to really
have. What we are talking about here is some practices
that are consistently implemented across the board for
anybody that might be developing job opportunities for
students that have a way of methodically going in and
sizing up a job. Not just from a specific job or a task
perspective, but kind of a multi-modal assessment,
looking at work environments and work culture as well.
This is especially important when we are talking about
individuals with more severe disabilities. It's important
that we understand what some of the variables in the work
environment might be that could potentially negatively
impact on a person's success.
When we talk about assessment within the job site
itself, it's really going to be three-pronged. It's going
to involve a global environment assessment—tools
that you can use to go in and methodically look at what
the environment is comprised of. Are there environmental
barriers? Are there environmental obstacles, for example,
to a student with a severe physical disability who may
use a wheelchair? Is there a flight of ten stairs going
in that they are not going to be able to maneuver? That's
an important piece of information for us to have. Once
you get inside the building, we would be talking about
things like lighting, distractions within the work
environment, possibly noxious fumes or smells for
individuals that may have certain types of impairments or
chemical sensitivities. A good environmental assessment
is taking a look at the outside of the employment site,
how you get to the employment site, how you get in,
what's involved once you are in, and what the environment
looks like. This is also important information for you to
bank, if you will, within a database for your
partnerships so that in the future you can go to that
file and pull it out to look at how accommodating and how
accessible a particular work environment is.
The second prong of that initial assessment is what we
would refer to as a work culture analysis. This
is an assessment to look at the things that make up this
work setting that impact a person's ability to be
assimilated. We are talking here about things like dress,
language, communication styles, certain types of
shortcuts that people take, accepted behavior, and
unaccepted behavior. It's really trying to get a feel for
what the work culture is comprised of and what it takes
to truly be assimilated within the workplace. Keep in
mind that just because somebody works in a job doesn't
necessarily mean that they have been integrated on an
array of different levels. They could physically be there
but not socially connected to the other workers they are
working with. This is a special consideration we need to
take into account when we are working with students with
more severe disabilities.
The final prong is really what we talked about
earlier: job and task analysis. This involves
looking very globally at what the essential functions of
the job are, breaking it down by cognitive tasks,
emotional/psychological tolerance, physical skills, and
then breaking it down into individual tasks. Now, you may
think, “We have never done that before. Why would we
have to do it here?” Keep in mind that we may be
talking about individuals that have disabilities within
the cognitive realm where they have difficulty possibly
understanding directions that are given, multi-step
tasks, or have difficulty sequencing steps. It's really
going to be important for you as a support person or for
your job coaches to make sure that they are equipped to
do a good job with task analysis. That's really your base
for providing systematic instruction to an individual
that might need that type or level of support in their
life.
That three-pronged assessment of the employment site
is what you are then going to match up against what you
know about the student. Learning about the student should
take a look at a lot of different things in that
student's life.
It's not stopping with just looking at what the
student's interests and preferences are, but it's taking
a look at what their capacities are, their abilities.
What are things that have worked as part of their
educational program in the past that have been very
successful? What hasn't been successful so we don't
replicate it? Let's learn from our mistakes. Also, it
takes a look at what some of the supports are that exists
in that person's life, both familial as well as community
that we might be able to build on. It takes a look at
indices of satisfaction for this consumer. A lot of time
when we are working with students, we ask them what they
want to do. They tell us what they want to do, and we
take it at face value, when what we have learned from
working with any person that's looking at career
development is that employment decisions are made based
on an array of indices, things that are important to
them.
An important part of the consumer or student
assessment is finding out the specific things that
students want to make sure are built into their training
or their placement opportunities such as benefits, number
of hours they have to work, flexibility, and access to
transportation. Is making a high wage more important than
four weeks of vacation time? Or is four weeks of vacation
time more important than how much I'm going to make as
far as an hourly wage? Those are things that are really
important for us to understand.
Some other specific supported employment services and
supports include facilitating job development, making
contact with employers, and facilitating reasonable
accommodation and possible job modifications. Sometimes
when you go to match those things up, what you find is
that often an employment site might have many of the
supports that are needed but there may be one or two that
are lacking. And those might be things that we need to
ask for accommodations for, or it might be as simple as
modifying or creating a jig that helps them form whatever
that piece of the job was that they needed to work on.
Over the last ten years, supported employment has
really undergone some significant changes. These changes
hold some important lessons for us because they hold
significant implications for youth that are involved in
school-to-work activities.
Supported employment strategies are really evolving
much more toward an individualized person-centered
approach (see list of Person-Centered Planning Related
Websites at end of this transcript). This goes back to
recognizing an individual's uniqueness. Personal career
building and person-centered planning is a movement away
from the traditional medical model or expert model and
really puts the person with the disability in the
driver's seat. In the past, we have seen a lot of
professionals and experts making decisions for them. In
light of this movement, we are seeing individuals being
supported in making their own decisions about their life
and about their careers.
Typically, service delivery planning is facilitated by
a team that's comprised of key players in that person's
life — family members, and other important friends
in their life, members from their special education team
(whatever those are referred to as in your state) that
guide the development of a student's individualized
education program, possibly employers, and some related
services personnel. There's a whole array of people that
should be around that table supporting that individual as
they are planning for their future career.
Planning teams should be operating on a principle that
all people, disabled or not, are going to require some
level of support to perform certain things in their life,
and it recognizes that individuals who experience
disability are just not part of the homogeneous group.
That's so important as you are looking at expanding your
school-to-work opportunities to students with more severe
disabilities.
I'm going to talk a little bit now about some
scheduling considerations, because when we are talking
about using supported employment strategies, often there
is going to be a support person that's involved. You may
already offer some of these services and you may want to
package them and offer them more formally than you are
now.
Program scheduling is going to vary with the intensity
of the on-the-job coaching that's required by the
student. Some individuals may not require this type of
support dependent on how good a job match has been done.
You are going to see that program scheduling is going to
vary based on that intensity. Most important for a
supported employment program is intense flexibility.
Since work baseline experiences are provided within an
actual employment setting, a student is probably going to
consistently require some schedule adaptations based on
the work schedule, especially if it's not consistent and
regular, and sometimes may be based on the whim of the
employer. Students might work in the mornings and
participate in the academic program in the afternoon, or
work Tuesday and Thursday and be in regular classes or
alternative programming Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Employment experiences could also be provided after
completion of the school day — you should keep that
in mind — in order to enable the student to maintain
a level of integration and social relationships similar
to their non-disabled peers in the academic setting.
With the movement toward inclusion that we are seeing
nationally, this is becoming an increasingly complex
scheduling consideration as parents are advocating very
strongly for the students to be included across
particular areas to help them achieve higher academic
standards. We are seeing less and less time available for
creating work-based learning opportunities. So, in some
regards, we have to get pretty creative when it comes to
how we are going to schedule it around a student's core
curriculum. Additional planning means that you're
probably going to have to identify the specific level of
service that a student may need.
For example, as we talked about earlier, a student
with fewer support needs may only require initial job
setup and orientation, while a student with more support
needs may require more intensive job supports like
systematic instruction at the job site, much more
intensive follow-up on supports, or maybe even just
simply advocacy and counseling as the person is adjusting
to the work environment itself.
Supported employment services or strategies that might
be delivered by local partnerships are really appropriate
for any student who is entering a work-based learning
experience and who needs intervention to enhance success.
I'm a firm believer that if we remove some of the names
of these models that we have out there and we took them
at face value, we will find that pretty much we are all
on the same plain — our support needs may vary, but
we all have support needs.
However, research is strongly suggesting that while
all students benefit from work-based learning, students
with severe disabilities have shown tremendous gains in
skills capacities and work behaviors while they are
provided a real opportunity to learn and apply them.
The age at which to begin providing supported
employment depends on the student. I see some individuals
that have been thirteen or fourteen years old that have a
very good concept of what it is they would like to do and
what they want to pursue as a career, that have entered
into working opportunities very young in their teenage
years. And then on the flip side, seventeen and eighteen
year old students are still having difficulties in
identifying a job that might be of interest to them. They
may not have been provided with quality career planning
up to that point and are having to really think about
their future direction as an adult. So, I wouldn't say
that grade levels are static when you are talking about
supported employment strategies. It's really based on the
point at which the student is ready and interested in
being exposed to community-based and work-based learning
experiences. And that's going to be based on that
student's interests and preferences and the level of
support that they are going to need when they are out
there.
Now, once you've identified your student, then you've
really got to begin to frame and get a better
understanding of the length of the support and services
that they are going to need to have. While federally, as
we talked about before, supported employment is targeted
for adults with severe disabilities requiring long-term
or lifelong job supports, the use of these strategies for
school-aged students is really time limited.
You have to keep in mind that at most you are going to
have this child until the age of twenty-one, and at some
point someone as an adult provider is going to need to
take over the support services that you've been providing
while they were in school. One of the case studies that
we are going to talk about later involves a school that's
uniquely positioned as an adult service provider that,
interestingly enough, picks up the student as he or she
is aging out of school and continues his or her
employment and training experience. So, keep in mind that
if you are going to work on developing environments and
work-based learning experiences where you are able to
support students, you have to consider who is going to
support them once they leave. Are we providing them with
opportunities that aren't available to them as an adult?
If you have limited adult service providers that
provide supported employment or if there is a waiting
list in your area for supported employment services,
these are important considerations to make as you are
going along. This comes into play as you begin to define
for us some advocacy that we, as a school or a
school-to-work partnership, really need to be considering
in order to begin projecting out five years down the line
how many of our kids are going to be exiting our
school-to-work program that are going to require
extensive long-term supports and making sure that
information is getting to the appropriate referral
source. One thing to keep in mind, whatever the
customized length of the work-based learning component,
is the importance of ensuring that the student is
connected to an adult provider who can continue service
and career development once the person has completed
school.
This kind of seamless movement from school to adult
life will ensure that the individual doesn't experience a
lapse in their services and support. Keep in mind you
have a really good resource here to build on, and that is
transition planning as it's mandated and outlined very
clearly in IDEA. Students with disabilities should have a
coordinated set of activities within their individualized
education program that outline goals and objectives very
clearly that promote the movement of the student from
school to the adult service provider community or to
post-secondary education or employment outcome if
long-term supports are needed. Typically your catalyst
for that is really maintaining very close ties with your
special education department in districts that you might
be working and making sure that you have a tight
partnership there when it comes to using that IEP as the
vehicle for building goals around school or work-based
learning opportunities and then reporting progress back
through to those personnel that are working with the
student in the school-based setting.
Let's move on to staffing. One important consideration
for you to keep in mind is that identifying specific
staff is secondary only to a comprehensive system of
personnel development which is going to equip those staff
members with the essential skills that they need. These
individuals need to be equipped to understand
disability from the context of support needs. They
also need to be capable of multilevel communication. These
people are going to be working out in the field with
these students in job sites. They are going to be, on one
hand, communicating with the student's primary education
teacher, and, at the same time, having interactions with
that student's supervisor at the job site, while still
maintaining contact within his or her own local
partnership to get updates. Individuals must also be comfortable
with job training in the community, flexible,
interested in the challenges that this model has
inherent to it, persistent, patient,
and able to facilitate and participate in team
approaches, especially when it comes to planning and
providing feedback on how the student is doing in the job
setting.
Diverse past work experience is also
important. Some of the best job coaches or employment
specialists I have worked with, having operated a
supported employment program myself on several occasions,
have been individuals that have just worked different
jobs in the community that have pretty diverse
experiences, not the rehabilitation or special education
sector. They have worked at a diner or tossed salads down
at the Olive Garden. These types of individuals have kind
of a keen understanding of what those specific jobs
entail already because they have worked them themselves.
Another important personal characteristic is being a good
problem solver. Sometimes they are going to get out
there and are going to be using a systematic instruction
plan and then come up against some barriers that need
tweaking. A person has to have the ability to do some
onsite, quick problem solving because they are out there
in the field by themselves. They should also be
tolerant of ambiguity and change, energetic,
assertive, social, organized, creative, supportive,
able to work unusual hours, and independent. The
list could go on and on and on. Most important is that
they care about other people and bring to the
work-based learning experience an array of skills and
competencies that they can build on to make for a rich
learning environment for the student.
Now, students that are being provided employment
supports using the strategies I have already talked about
are going to achieve a whole array of different outcomes.
When we talk about the outcomes that students should be
achieving, that's really dictated by what the student
identified as a particular outcome before we delivered
the service. Keep in mind we are living in an age of
continuous quality improvement. Satisfaction of our
customer is dictated by the service we provide: Did we
deliver what it was that they said that they wanted to
begin with? What are those long-term adult outcomes that
are extremely important to the student? What do they look
like? Try to put some meat around the bones so that you
have a better idea of what types of services and support
you are going to need to package around them through the
next few years of their educational program to make sure
that they come out the other side having attained it.
One skill that we have seen students gaining is the
ability to explore occupational areas in greater detail.
Many of these students that I have seen with more
severe disabilities that are now being provided
access to the competitive employment arena are going in
there with a very limited repertoire of experiences. They
don't understand what careers are available in the
community. Maybe they have been told their whole lives
that they don't have to work because of the severity of
the disability or that people with severe disabilities
don't work, a common message that we have heard in the
past. One of the richest outcomes that we can really
support students in obtaining is just a better
understanding of what's out there and what's available to
them so they can make more informed choices. We can help
them to learn the education and performance requirements
of certain jobs. What do particular occupations require?
I don't know how many students I have worked with
that, when you ask them what they want to do, stipulate a
goal that makes you sit back and think, “I don't
think that this is something that's viable for you.”
When you begin to question them a little further, you
find out they don't have a clear understanding of what
that particular career requires. So that's an important
outcome for us to think about. When a student says,
“I want to become a brain surgeon,” we should
not immediately discount it and say, “Well, that's
not viable and it's not realistic.” We should
explore with that student and look at what is required,
helping the student understand whether or not they have
the abilities and the capacities to make that a viable
goal or an occupational objective for themselves.
The whole career development process is another
important outcome. Make sure that your students with
severe disabilities, if you have a career development
planning process, have access to the same planning
process used for all the other students in your
school-to-work program. Career planning is not based on
whether you are disabled or not. It's based on human
experience in how we make decisions and how we are led to
make decisions in our life. That's beneficial to students
with severe disabilities as well.
Another important outcome is just simple development
of employment history, references, and allowing and
affording the student an opportunity to demonstrate their
capacities and skills. Even though many of us in
rehabilitation and special education say we believe that
all individuals, regardless of disabilities, can work, we
are constantly challenged as we meet people that have
more severe and more extensive disabilities. We are
challenged to really think outside of the box and think
of an environment this person can work in. What types of
environments would support their disability and maximize
their ability to perform a job? It's so important to
provide students with opportunities to really demonstrate
their ability to perform instead of just projecting
whether or not they are going to perform. Many times they
use vocational assessments and evaluations that are pen
and paper tasks or work samples that are in very low stem
environments which really don't translate to whether or
not a student actually is going to be able to perform
when motivated in a natural environment. We try to
predict that. What we have learned with individuals and
students with very severe disabilities is that you can't
project that ability. You can't predict that ability
based on those types of evaluations. It's important to
get them out there and afford them the opportunity to
demonstrate their capacities and skills and abilities to
perform jobs.
Dan Linneman: Great, thank you, Thomas. I also
want to reinforce the notion that supported employment,
besides generating personal outcomes, shows the world
that these kids have a place in it.
With that comment, do any of you have questions for
Thomas?
Zaf Khan (Tennessee): My name is Zaf Khan. I'm
the special education director for Williamson County,
Tennessee. Thomas, you mentioned a values-based context.
I would like more information about what you meant by
that. And you also talked about the 1973 to 1998
amendment in the law. Can you tell me a little more about
the amendments in 1998 with the Vocational Rehabilitation
Act?
Thomas Golden: When we talk about a
values-based context for delivery of these services, we
are talking about a common values-based context that
parallels the inclusion movement within special
education. It starts with a firm belief that students can
benefit from being provided the same access to curriculum
and their community as their non-disabled peers. They can
learn from that and, provided with the right supports,
they can be successful at it. So when we talk about a
values-based context for delivering supported employment,
we are talking about not focusing on the individual's
classification or disability, but instead focusing on
their abilities and capacities and building programs
based on them. Nobody is going to get me a job based on
the fact that I am a really anal-retentive person. But
they might be able to get me a job based on the fact that
I have good organizational skills. We need to remove the
student from the disability and say, “I'm not
convinced that the disability is inherent to the student
but more that possibly the disability is inherent to the
environment.” Our final question in clarifying a
shared-values base becomes, “Where could we find
environments that will sustain this individual and
support them in working toward their goals?”
Dan Linneman: Do you want to talk a little bit
about some tools that people have used to go through the
process that you were just talking about?
Thomas Golden: They are not fancy, expensive
things that you buy. My experience has been your best
tool is sitting down with the kid and asking them a
series of questions and sitting down with other key
stakeholders in their life and asking them a set of
questions. I am talking about a person-centered planning
approach, asking the student, “What are your
interests and preferences? What are supports that exist
in your life right now? What are things that have been or
have proven to not be positive for you in the past? What
are things that you do like? What are things that have
been positive for you that have resulted in outcomes?
What made them unique for you? What type of role have mom
and dad played in your life in helping you get to the
point that you are today? What do you see as important
things that we as a school can provide for you in
preparing you for adult life?”
This person-centered approach starts from the get-go
putting that person in the driver's seat and holding them
accountable for telling us what it is they want instead
of us, from our professional or our expert position,
trying to recommend based on what we know from an
assessment what it is that we think that they can do. It
really brings about an ongoing dialogue. In fact, the
more I'm in the field, the more I try to move away from
the term “assessment,” because I think that
career planning is a lifelong process of continually
learning about yourself. So, any tool that you have that
provides a student with more information about who they
are and where they are at on their career planning road
is beneficial to them and helps them make better
decisions.
Regarding the Rehabilitation Act amendments, what I
can tell you is that while it does define supported
employment and breaks down what they mean by an
integrated work environment, it is not something that has
a great deal of bearing for school districts primarily
because the Rehabilitation Act outlines the state/federal
vocational rehabilitation system. I simply referenced it
because that is where supported employment is federally
defined for us. And what we pick and glean from that is
simply the core definition.
Zaf Khan (Tennessee): Thank you. Also, in the
new 1997 IDEA amendments, children who are fourteen years
and older now are required to have transition plans. What
are your feelings about this? How should schools attempt
to address this in terms of transition planning for
school-to-work programs for this new IDEA amendment?
Thomas Golden: I think it's important. I am
going to just share personally my own feelings about it.
I think it's a natural thing to happen. I was talking
with some school-to-work folk the other day when I was
out in New Mexico for the NTA Tools for the Future
Workshop. It amazed me, as I was discussing the
components of transition that are outlined in IDEA, that
they seemed to parallel career planning very closely.
Transition planning doesn't make sense just for students
with disabilities. It makes sense for all students. The
earlier we start that dialogue about adult aspirations,
the better off we are. I will give you an example.
In New York State, we really consider transition
planning to start at age twelve with something called the
Level One Vocational Assessment, which is really nothing
more than a person-centered interview that I have
referenced earlier which base-lines where a student is
right now with their adult aspirations. Where did they
see themselves living, learning, and earning as an adult?
And from that, we begin to draw some conclusions about
needed transition instruction, and by age fourteen, that
student is going to need this included in their IEP. My
experience has been that I can't identify student's
needed transition instruction unless I have already
identified their long-term adult outcomes in those three
areas of living, learning, and earning. If I ask the
student, “Where do you see yourself working?”
and he says, “You know, I have not really thought
about it” or “I don't think I want to
work,” some might discount it. I say that's valuable
information because I can make some good educational
programming decisions based upon that. For a student who
says, “Well, I really don't know what's available to
me,” that immediately draws to mind that this kid
needs to have a tight connection to his school-to-work
activities that are going to expose him to different
careers. What that programming might look like could be
very different for each individual based on the support
needs. But identifying those long-term adult outcomes is
essential to putting a statement of needed transition
instruction in the IEP.
Following that, we get into actually having the
full-blown transition component at age fifteen in the
IEP, and that's going to include not only a statement of
needed transition instruction, but it gets into
identifying the student's long-term adult outcomes in
those three areas that we had discussed — the
provider of a community service that this student may
need, what the service is going to be, and the date that
it's going to start. And then finally, a description of
the coordinated set of activities that will lead that
student toward or help that student refine the long-term
adult outcome they had described to us very early on.
We will revisit that whole process every year
thereafter, with a focus on helping that student either
refine or work toward the long-term adult outcome. I have
heard many educators say, “Well, you know, I just
worked with this kid and he changed his long-term adult
outcomes this year.” That's okay! That's what we
want to happen. That means the student is going through a
career development process and making probably very good
decisions based on information they glean this year
through their IEP. We should be working kids at age
twelve or very early on in their academic career. I think
it makes good sense.
There are a lot of practical tools that are out there
that can help you with that. The Transition Research
Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
have some invaluable resources on their web site that I
would encourage you to go and take a look at that can
really assist you in figuring out how to integrate
transition within your existing IEPs (http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/sped/tri/institute.html;
telephone: 217.333.2325).
Zaf Khan (Tennessee): Thank you. That was very
informative. With regards to resources, you mentioned a
number of very interesting concepts, for example, global
environment assessment. You also talked about culture
analysis, work integration, and systematic instruction.
What resource book or web site talks more about this? I
am very interested in getting more information about
these various concepts. Could you give me some lead into
this area?
Thomas Golden: Certainly. There are several
resources that you can connect to. One that immediately
comes to mind is the Rehabilitation Research and Training
Center on Workplace Supports at Virginia Commonwealth
University (http://www.worksupport.com;
telephone: 804.828.1851). It is under the direction of
Paul Wehman and John Kregel (pwehman@atlas.vcu.edu or
jkregel@saturn.vcu.edu), the forefathers in the whole
supported employment movement almost twenty years ago.
That center has developed invaluable resources and tools
on how to establish work-based learning experiences for
students with disabilities. They have, I believe, some of
those resources on the web site. If not, I know they have
published several helpful tools through P. H. Brooks
publishing company (http://www.pbrookes.com).
The University of Illinois comes to mind again. The
University of Minnesota also has several good
publications (http://ici.umn.edu/products;
telephone: 612.624.4512). I know here at Cornell through
the Program on Employment and Disability, we have several
handbooks, guides, and training manuals that might be of
assistance to you that lay out different tools (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/ped;
ilr_ped@cornell.edu;
telephone: 607.255.7727).
If you are looking for what those tools might be,
before you buy anything, make sure you do yourself a good
Internet search and explore some of these sites that I
have talked to you about today. All of them have links to
other web sites and you may just find you are able to
pull some pretty good tools for free right off the web.
This stuff isn't rocket science, but you do need to have
a good tool belt there when you are thinking about how to
do these types of assessments with students and do these
types of assessments of different workplaces to make sure
you are doing good job matching.
Most states have what are called University Affiliated
Programs (http://www.aucd.org/).
Those are invaluable resources as well for pulling up
some of these tools.
Zaf Khan (Tennessee): Thank you.
Dan Linneman: Okay. I want to thank you,
Thomas, for your participation. You've presented a lot of
information clearly and quickly.
Here are some starting points for developing
person-centered planning processes. These sites are
provided for information only, and may or may not reflect
the philosophy, values and initiatives of the NTA.
Publications by John O'Brien and Connie Lyle
O'Brien
http://thechp.syr.edu/rsapub.htm
Training Resource Network: Supported
Employment & Other Disability Resources
http://www.trninc.com/
Best Practices--Transition Services
http://www.everhart.leon.k12.fl.us/ts_bestprac.htm
What You Should Know About Personal Futures
Planning
http://www.beachcenter.org/
Transition Bibliography
http://www.tr.wou.edu/dblink/transbib2.htm
Person-Centered Planning Practice Guideline
http://www.michigan.gov/mdch/0,1607,7-132-2941_4868_4900-14810--,00.html
Inclusion Press Home Page
http://www.inclusion.com
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