|
Transcript of NTA Conference Call Presentation held on 10/23/96 Building a School-to-Work System that Serves All YouthThree states share their perspectives
Bill Sugarman, Vermont
School-to-Work |
![NTA [logo link]](../../images/nta.gif){kind=small} |
Mary Mack (National Transition Alliance/National Transition Network): Thank you for joining us for this Topical Teleconference. Vermont, Oregon and Colorado will be talking about what they are doing to build a STW system that serves All students, All youth including youth with disabilities. Bill Sugarman will discuss Vermont 's perspective on collaboration and governance structure; Nancy Hargis, sitting in for Brigid Flannery, will present Oregon's perspective on marketing; and Susan McAlonan will present Colorado's perspective on aligning policies and funding streams.
To begin, I will introduce Bill Sugarman. Bill was formally Vermont's coordinator for the Transition Change Project for students with disabilities. The state of Vermont has just completed its fifth and final year of funding for the Transition Change Project and is a leader in the area of inclusion with students with disabilities. Bill is currently the Work Placement and Student Apprenticeship Coordinator for a regional vocational center in Vermont.
Bill Sugarman (Vermont): I've been asked to speak on collaboration and governing structures. The short version is that I think we've done really well in terms of representing students with disabilities-the operative word there being 'representing'. Our next step-and I don't say next challenge, I just say next step-is moving from representation to direct involvement of people with disabilities. In terms of collaboration, Vermont has a long standing history of collaborating. This in part because of our small size, and in part because of the people in leadership positions-their values were really solidly behind including all students and not developing two systems and in whatever it may be, whether its education or employment services, having one system. So in terms of collaboration, when the School-to-Work Opportunities Act was applied for for our planning grant, as well as our Implementation grant, the Department of Education, the Governor's Office pulled together all the key agencies and parties. Included were different divisions within education, special education and career and lifelong education-which is what we call our vocational or technical education-including a major partner there in terms of gender equity, the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, Vocational Rehabilitation [Voc Rehab], and Department of Employment and Training, etc. Many groups came together, though not all. For the people who weren't necessarily 'at the table', there was a concerted effort made to make sure that they received drafts of plans. In the collaboration that built our first plan, we looked at a number of options and asked, "To ensure access in STW for students with disabilities, do we ensure that access by making two systems, or two funding streams or assurances by way of separating out money?" For instance, in New Jersey,-and I'm not picking on this at all, I actually think it may have worked out in the long run-we asked, "Should we separate out and set aside, as New Jersey has done, an amount of money that would go specifically to programs and services for students with disabilities?" And our group said, "No. Lets make one system. Let's make sure that there are assurances that, for whatever initiatives are started, whatever components happened, they're opened to All students."
So I think in terms of collaboration, taking that stand has been very useful. In most regional programs the representation again, comes from Special Education [Spec Ed], Voc Rehab and Employment and Training. And in a number of regions the key leaders of the regional programs were special educators. There was a lot of discussion about, "Who's at the table? Can you get to the table? Well, we're at the door, but we're not at the table." We were part of building the plan. So that was good, but it was one step shy of where we should've been, which was not just representation from agencies, but much more direct involvement by people with disabilities in planning and development.
Governance structures took the same approach as our initial collaborations around developing the plan. We have the Human Resource's Investment Council at the STW Office, which is housed at the Governor's Office. The Human Resource Investment Council has oversight, and we have lead partners. The lead partners include: the University of Vermont-from the Center for Transition and Employment, which has taken an active stance to make sure we are representing students with disabilities-the Department of Employment and Training, the Department of Education, the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, the Vermont Chambers of Commerce Business-Ed Partnership, and others. The governance structure is such that we have the Human Resources Investment Council, all our lead partners, some interagency teams at the state level, as well as 14 regional partnerships. So in all of those structures there are people who either, by their personal histories or their agency affiliation, represent students with disabilities. The voice is heard, but it's not direct, and that's where we need to go.
Nancy and Susan, do you have some comments from the viewpoint of your states?
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): I think that probably Oregon's experience is very parallel to yours Bill. Clearly at the state level we have not had students with disabilities of any age as part of the planning cadre; they're well represented by a variety of agency advocates, but not at the table directly. I think your point is just an excellent one. My hunch is, and I can't verify this, but my hunch is that something very similar has happened at our local levels as well.
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): I'm not going to comment because I'm afraid that if I start commenting, then I'll do my whole shtick and I'll have nothing to say and I'll just be making up stories. My comments are going to be around aligning policies and funding streams and I'm going to address some of things you did Bill, so we'll just say that much.
Bill Sugarman (Vermont): Okay good, and I know for the other participants on this teleconference there will be time for questions later in the call. Nancy if you could take over from here...you are the coordinator of Oregon's school to work initiative?
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): That's correct. Okay, in the interest of both time and the transcriptions that will be done, I'm going to refer to our STW marketing plan. I want to give you some highlights of our approach to developing a general marketing plan for STW and then describe a current activity that I think is very exciting. Not being marketers ourselves, one of our first steps was to contract with a very well known marketing firm to help us figure out what we needed to do. They decided that research is really the foundation for effective marketing and communication plans. Without it the development is probably flawed and misses the mark. Attitudinal research, in particular, among key audiences about STW and related issues, we thought was very important to gain. So we began by devoting some significant early time to site visits and interviews that would develop a base of knowledge about STW. With that knowledge base, then survey instruments could be developed which would really get the data we needed to build a sound plan. So site visits were conducted with such groups as the Department of Education staff to really understand the federal legislation and Oregon's approach to it.
The marketing firm conducted sight visits in eight different geographically dispersed communities. They did interviews or focus groups with teachers, administrators, students, school board members, parents, employers and other folks at the local level. They also interviewed the range of employers-large/small, public/private, local/regional/statewide. Based on all of these insights, they developed a survey methodology, that is really kind of interesting. They surveyed 194 school administrators with a ten minute phone interview; 299 teachers, and again a ten minute phone interview; 744 members of the public, which was a 15 minute phone interview; a sub-set of 325 parents was polled from those 744 members of the public; 300 employers, a 12 minute phone interview; and 400 students, and they did a ten minute telephone interview with these students, ages 15 to 18 from randomly selected Motor Vehicle Division records. (So if you wonder how Motor Vehicle records are used, this is one of the ways we've used them!) The findings are interesting. Among the highlight questions, they asked about the public schools. Roughly half all of those folks asked (parents, public employers) rated the public school system in Oregon as 'excellent' or 'pretty good', but more than 40% rated it as only 'fair' or 'poor'. They then followed that up with the question, "Does the K-12 system need to be changed or to be reformed?" And really quite a significant majority of every audience said that, in fact is the case. Students were the least sure about that, and I suppose that that probably makes sense.
Moving on to some questions about STW more specifically, they picked one on career preparation and asked if every student should receive some kind of career preparation while in high school. The high eighty percentile range for all groups said that absolutely that is the case, and followed that up by saying that the schools are currently not doing that. Another question that I think is particularly relevant is, "Should high schools be expected to provide the skills necessary for students to succeed in the workforce without a college education?" Between two-thirds and three-fourths of all responding groups thought that high school should in fact teach the skills needed to succeed without a four year college education, that our schools are not currently doing that, and that schools need to make some changes to succeed in that way.
We used the information to try to identify some arguments which would help move public opinion. We asked ourselves, "What kinds of statements would help people value STW?" We pushed their emotional buttons and I think there are a couple of them that won't surprise you. The number one argument really was related to relevance in keeping kids in school. The question was, "If you knew STW could keep more kids off the streets by making school more relevant and giving them hope for a job, would you favor or oppose?" The lowest ranking is 84% and that came from teachers; the highest ranking is 92% and that came from students. So this is a strong argument that really gets people's attention. The follow up question was to ask about college bound students: "If STW would give college bound students reasons to pay more attention to their studies by seeing how academic courses apply to the real world, would you favor or oppose STW?" Eighty five to ninety percent in each group found that to be quite a compelling argument, so the idea of relevance related to STW really came through loud and clear.
We came to the conclusion that it is important to identify these messages and follow through with a variety of materials. At the state level we have produced three brochures based on this research; one targeted to students, one targeted to employers, and one targeted to educators. These have been distributed locally, as well, along with personal contact and technical assistance from our marketing consultant. She's gone out and worked with each of our local partnership regions, talked with them about their marketing plans and provided them with a lot of advice. So far that has worked relatively well for us and we plan to continue this year.
That's what we did early on. The current activity that we're quite excited about is a resource brochure that is being jointly developed between Voc Rehab, STW Office, Special Education and the Chamber of Commerce Executives Group around this state. This brochure will describe a variety of federal, state and local publications and resources that are available to help employers hire persons with disabilities of all ages. These flyers, when there completed, will be distributed to all of our Chambers of Commerce. A complete set of each of these resource materials will be housed in most locations so people have fairly ready access to these materials. This activity we hope will be off the ground around the first of December and we'll be eager to see how that goes.
Bill Sugarman (Vermont): What really caught my ear specific to students with disabilities was the brochure, that it identified all the different agencies and resources available to employers. And your research sounds terrific. Was the research for All students?
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): Yes. We're going to do some follow up research this year, and part of the research will be to try to get some sense of the scope of the inclusion of All kids. We're going to use a variety of perspectives. We will be using this marketing firm as part of the attitudinal research to get an impression, while we also do the traditional data collection and other kinds of activities to get a better handle on that.
Bill Sugarman (Vermont): Great. Other marketing that we've done has been the development of the Career Development Guidelines that were put together by a collaborative group. Unfortunately, representatives did not have disabilities, but the set of guidelines has gotten quite a bit of use, especially in public schools and colleges. And the other was a brochure that was developed at the state level that highlighted All students, which is used as a template for all the 14 regional partnerships. I think we need to do a lot more radio and television marketing. Susan, any comments on the marketing piece?
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): Well, I think we've had similar experiences as both of you. The one thing I think that has been really exciting in our state is the CEO of Norwest Banks, who resides in Colorado, is taking School-to-Career [STC] on as one of their corporate missions. So we have lots of leaderships at the local sights because there are many Norwest Banks in Colorado, and he can get to a lot of press. Also, a television station here has picked this up from the newspapers. We're starting to do some things around All students, highlighting youth with disabilities, but our initial phase was just to get it out there and make sure people understood that this was All kids; it doesn't matter whether nor not they're going or have a disability, All means everybody. So that's been our real push in Colorado this first year.
Bill Sugarman (Vermont): Great. And before we begin and just as an aside, surprisingly when we say-and it's written down and millions of places-All students, people say, "What do you mean All students?"
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): We've started to say every student. It's a little harder to have exclusionary groups then.
Bill Sugarman (Vermont): Well lets hear from Susan. Susan, am I correct in saying that your with the Transition Systems Change?
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): No, our Transition Systems Change director is Sandy Thompson. I'm with STC. I represent the Department of Education. Our management team is an interagency team and my FT is 100% directed to STC. I'm going to talk about aligning policies and funding streams, and I thought what a dumb topic that is. And I figured because I missed the conference call where everybody picked topics, I got stuck with this. But I stepped back and really thought about what it means to align policies and funding streams in general and here in Colorado with STC, where are they with youth with disabilities and how is this all coming together. Then it made perfect sense for Colorado to be talking about this piece. We, like the other two states, have a Systems Change project-well we just finished it-and that's been real instrumental. But I want to take a different bend on this, and talk about what alignment means.
I think when we started out, and when we stepped back, and said, "One of our guiding principles is alignment," we had to ask ourselves what does that mean, and how do we get there? And what it means in Colorado is that we are trying to align every single educational initiative together. So when we're out there talking about STW / STC, we're talking about good education, what make sense for our community, what makes sense for our employers and what makes sense for our students. So alignment is something that we are really all about and STC is part of that. Then I stepped back a little further, and said, "What does that mean for youth with disabilities?" And the disability piece is very involved in STC. But we realized that aligning policy and funding streams can't happen unless you align people-unless people are able to step back out of their narrow role, and see themselves in a more general, global way. So we asked our people in local communities and at the state level that represent youth with disabilities to step back away from their role as an advocate for persons with disabilities and look at their own skills. When we started looking at their skills, we realized they had some of the best expertise in the state-in work-based, school-based and connecting activities. They were all doing it. So we asked them to frame themselves as experts in STC that happens to be demonstrating their expertise with a population that has disabilities. So that was really helpful, because then we have people coming into the conversation at the state level and at the local level saying, "We're here to help," instead of, "We're here to make sure this system doesn't mess up our students or our clients." So that's been a mind shift-that what they're doing is taking their skills and aligning them with STC.
On our state level management team, we have people from labor, education, voc ed, higher ed, voc rehab and community colleges participating, which has been interesting because they all had some background in special education. So our director keeps saying here in Colorado, "Every time I want something great to happen at the local level or the state level, I ask somebody who has a background in Special Education." And I think the reason it has happened is because if you are a special education person, a community person, an agency person or you have a disability, you have to figure out all the different systems that exist to get around them. So we've really taken the approach that we're going to build a system for All kids. Now how that shapes out in a systems structure at the state level is through our management team. At the local level we have interagency teams or boards that are dealing with youth with disabilities and they are required partners-they must be at the table, they must sign off on the application, they must have opportunities to design and implement the STC system.
So with that design, we have an opportunity to build a system that is really going to work for All kids. My experience in the past has been that you build a system, you sit down and there's problems. And we say, "What are the problems? Well, it must be this person, they're not fitting the system." In actuality it's because the system is not designed correctly because we didn't include those people at the front end to design the system. So we've made it our process in Colorado, that when we have teams of people-committees, tasks forces, teams at a state and local level-we do not have an All students team. We have those people that have expertise-and we're talking about disabilities today so I'll use that as an example-sitting on every one of our committees and tasks forces at the state or local level. So we avoid special populations people sitting in a room talking to each other and never getting into the main stream dialogue. Now, we're not there, and I think we've done some really excellent work with aligning people, systems and educational reform initiatives. Our next step is to move into doing some joint funding and we're starting that on a small scale. We talked about marketing earlier, and one of the ideas is to do some PR pieces on staff development and how to support educators and contrast that to the amount of resources business puts into staff development for their employees and the lack of what we do for the most part for educators.
[gap in tape]
We also have school-wide programs where education flex [Ed Flex] stayed, so we could use our money for special populations in a little more integrated fashion. We have sixty of those schools up and running, doing some really nice work, and yet we're going to add the STC piece to those schools in a real systemic way, so we have some models. But our whole kind of bent has been, "Let's align people and programs, so that we're all talking about one system, and let's help our people who are representing special populations also bring expertise to the table in STC." We say this so that people don't hear that somebody here is representing people with disabilities and consequently they run the other direction-which has been some of our experiences here, that we sometimes see people advocating too strongly about the bigger system. So those are the kinds of things we're doing. It's interesting, we just had our last round of applications for Local Partnerships and we decided since we had integrated the 'All students', we wouldn't have them address that separately, we'd have them integrate it into their plan. But guess what? It wasn't there, so now we're making everybody follow up and say exactly what they are going to do to make sure all populations can have a full range of STC activities.
Bill Sugarman (Vermont): Alrighty, Susan thank you very much. Nancy any observations, comments?
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): It is a challenge isn't it? I think it's real interesting that your Local Partnership applicants did not specify that inclusion. I would guess that we would find something similar if we did that. It's not up on the screen far enough yet for some reason.
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): And when you talked with them they said, "Well of course, and we're going to do this and we're going to do this. We just didn't write it down, we just kind of assumed you'd know we were talking about everybody here." So it was interesting.
Bill Sugarman (Vermont): Well, in Vermont, I think some of the finest blending of funding streams is at two levels. One is at the very local level, the high school level specifically, with a couple of programs that have started with special education funds, such as employment programs, to serve students. When they went to the school board to get support, the school board folks said, "Now wait a minute. If we give you just general funds, then you could serve everybody?" This was the programs' best dream. So for about eight years or so in one particular high school and in a number of others that have been trying to get to that level of local support, being able to access just the general town tax dollars has been the easy way to blend funding.
The other is at the state level with the State Team for Children and Families, which is one example that I'm more proud of in terms of having direct participation by family members and people with disabilities. There they are asking the questions, "How can we blend these funds? How can we look at outcome based funding?" In terms of locals accessing the state grant, we ask, "What assurances are you going to make around gender equity, adult students and students with disabilities?" I think it's important to keep it on people's radar screens by asking, "How are you going to address All students?"
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): I have one other comment about an activity here. Like Colorado, we have both Ed Flex and Work Flex in Oregon. We have five local partnerships who have integrated our plans, at least to the best of their ability at this point. They are sharing where they're combining funds in general, STW, Carl Perkins, JTPA, and it kind of mushrooms from there. They're not able to combine the funding streams, but at least they have one plan that went through a very rigorous local process to get all the partners at the table. We'll see how that actually works out. It's a very challenging experiment, and I think it's going to need some time to work out and see where the kinks are and where the best practices are.
Mary Mack (NTA/NTN): Thank you Bill, Nancy and Susan. When we first decided to do this teleconference, there was a part of me that was really scared that we would have so much to cover that nothing would get covered, and I cannot begin to describe how much I appreciate what you have done today, and how much we have gotten done. Now I'd like to open it up to questions from the other states, or additional information on what they're doing. Who'd like to start it off?
Judy Reichle (California): We're wondering, in terms of the data collection that you have to do for the National STW Office, if you're getting any counts on inclusion of students with disabilities right now in STW programs anywhere in your states, and if so can you let us know numbers?
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): I can't let you know numbers. We are sending out a data dictionary-we have been working with our local partners over this summer to develop some state performance measures that align with the federal reporting. We will certainly be including that in our system, but right now we really don't have any hard data, but we hope to by February.
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): We're collecting that, and I don't have any data yet either, but what we are doing is adding collection fields to the state data reporting system, which is going to help us in the long run. For example, through the Department of Education, local school systems have to give us data; we're going to add some fields for STC so they will start collecting that data as well, and then we'll be able to sort it by different categories, including youth with disabilities. We're trying to add data collection any place we can, so it's something people automatically do as a part of another collection process.
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): Susan is there a student based information system in Colorado already in place?
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): Yes there is, but we don't have one. We're adding to our Vocational Education database in much the same way, and we can expand that to All students.
Judy [no last name available] (Louisiana): I have a couple of questions. First though, I want to reinforce that the way you have approached these concepts of this particular teleconference has been excellent. I'm going to ask two questions that may combine into one, or not. You talked about representing the needs and issues of students with disabilities initially, but all three of you have expressed some concern about involvement of students with disabilities. In Louisiana we are waiting for word on our STW Implementation grant; we're also in our first year of our Transition project, so we're in a wonderful position to learn from you. My two-part question is this: Would you start with representation and then phase in involvement? Would you start right out with involvement and avoid that first step? If so, how? The generic question is, what's the greatest lesson to share with people just getting started who'd like to benefit from your experiences in blending these two fields?
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): I think we've been very successful. One of the highlights for STC is how youth with disabilities are being included. One of the things we did in our last year of the Systems Change grant was to develop the focus around STC. So we were talking about STC as the big piece, and then Transition Coordination as a subset of STC or STW. And that I think was really helpful because then we're all talking about the same system, and we're saying that the system is for All students, and some students will need some special strategies to access the full range of opportunities. And I think starting immediately with blending Transition and STC and getting people at the table is really important. And I think the second thing that was really amazing here is the disability folks had more of the expertise around, "How do you implement school-based, work-based and connecting activities?" They had a lot of content, so people were really excited to have them as part of the dialogue early on, because they had so many good ideas. And they understood about Voc Ed, Labor, Employment, and all the different kinds of systems, because they've been out there dealing with those for a number of years. My recommendation would be to early on frame your Systems Change within STW and get people at the table immediately, not talking to each other, but in that wider discussion about what is the system going to look like. That's where we've really had our successes.
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): The other piece that Oregon has really followed through from the beginning is to link our whole STW effort with our education reform laws. We're always talking about All students. Process wise, I wish we had done the involvement earlier, but that is the hindsight view at this point. But if you had some other state initiatives that fit in, I think they're clearly very supportive, beyond the Systems Change grant.
Bill Sugarman (Vermont): I'd like to encourage Louisiana to get parents of students with disabilities and adults with disabilities immediately on the state interagency teams and on the staff of whoever may be hired for regional or state partnerships. It's never been my experience that, as good as representation can be from people who care and have experience, it's not the same as having that experience yourself. Some of the problems we've had include the meeting structure for the Local Core Transition Team. If it's not specific to that person, it can be tedious and boring. To have a 16 year old student of any kind sit on a state interagency team where we 'bla bla bla' for awhile gets deadly. My experience is they expect turnover and plan for it; so don't get one student, get five.
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): The other thing we've had success in Colorado, dove tailing on Bill's suggestion, is we get employers involved because that's always real hard initially. We ask employers who've been working with disability-focused programs to come to the table, and to get on those committees and task forces. They come as an employer, but then they also have the experience of working with youth with disabilities in employment. So they can play two roles, and people are always real welcoming of any employer you can get at the table. That's been another strategy that Colorado has used to make sure that dialogue happens.
Bob Hall (New Jersey): Bill, I want to respond to something you said earlier. You talked about the set-aside money that New Jersey used for individuals with disabilities. And there were disadvantages as well as advantages to that. The advantages were that we were able to focus on the demonstration of what it would specifically look like for students with disabilities working under the STW guidelines, dealing with certification issues and just raising the awareness and consciousness level of students receiving special education services. And the disadvantage, I think, was that maybe initially the STW Office thought that they would be doing enough for us by providing $600,000 initially to do that. But, we are no longer funding any additional STW special grants; all grants are following the federal guidelines of working with All students. What our grant is doing this year is a needs assessment of all the STW funded projects serving and working with people with disabilities, and then providing technical assistance based upon their individual needs through our grant funds. In addition, we've identified five students from throughout the state with significant disabilities who are deaf, blind, multiply handicapped, are requiring assisted technology. We're going to be working with them, providing them intensive student-centered technical assistance under the STW guidelines. We'll also be working with representatives from their STW office, as well as offering the technical assistance that we've identified to support the student. So we'll work with the parent and the student, as well as the school district team and local team to support the student.
I was handed a video today and I've seen it before, it's a STW video in New Jersey which is, I think, adequately representing students with disabilities. We're going to be working on an interagency STW conference and one of the days we're going to highlight transition of students with disabilities. So there are, I guess, some things going well, but still a lot of work to do in many other areas.
Bonny [no last name available] (New Mexico): I have a question for Nancy. Nancy regarding your research for marketing, you indicated that you initiated that early on. Was that in your development phase of your STW initiative? Or was that once you began your implementation phase?
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): We began it under our developmental grant, and it's continued. One of the nice things about the ability to continue has been the continuity of knowledge in this forum-they understand STW and school reform, and they become not only wonderful technical assistance providers and consultants, but they're marketing STW all the time with all of their other plans as appropriate.
Mary Mack (NTA/NTN): Anybody else have any questions? Ohio, I don't think we've heard from you.
Shannon Gordon (Ohio): I think a lot of the lessons learned are the same. Our Transition project is a year ahead of our STW initiative, so in that way, we are really learning from each other, learning from the local partnership under the Transition project and how they're coming together. And for the STW effort it's really been a learning experience, because what we've seen begin to happen is our disability representative sits on our partnership too, instead of bringing the two groups together, so that there's not duplication out in the field. And that's really where we're working now, to connect and build the system. We have all the pieces out there, but how do we connect the pieces and encourage the local level to begin connecting their pieces, as we are at the state level.
Mary Mack (NTA/NTN): Anyone else has something to say, something to add?
Janice (California): Bill mentioned the Student Assistance Corporation, and we were curious about that. And we also want an explanation of Ed Flex and Work Flex, please.
Bill Sugarman (Vermont): Okay, well the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation is an entity that you've probably have a different name for. They are essentially the broker's end of the financial aid-Pell Grants, etc. They also have outreach workers and do a tremendous job on career development and counseling for students and for adults.
Janice (California): We wish we had that!
Bill Sugarman (Vermont): Well, I imagined in many places there's an organization at the state level in some way that is the recipient of financial aid applications, and then they broker them amount from there. In Vermont, the beauty of this organization is not only do they do that, and they have tremendous capacity there, but they have a wonderful resource library that is open to anybody, as well as outreach workers. They come to almost every, if not every, school, and do a middle grade career guidance program, and they do career guidance for adults as well. That's that part.
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): I think I was the one that
talked about Ed Flex.
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): You do Ed Flex, I'll do Work Flex.
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): OK. Do you want to do Work Flex
first?
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): OK. They're pretty similar. As Work Flex is used in Oregon, we have the ability to request a variety of waivers, particularly from the Department of Labor for JTPA programs where their regulations become barriers to our STW activities and to our integrated planning activities. This is relatively new, I think we've only had this capacity for perhaps a couple of months. So far, we've made some progress I would say, with some of the JTPA regulations, but it's a tough, tough road I think, and when it comes right down to it, it's hard for institutions that have been, I think, pretty inflexible to become more so overnight.
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): And what we're doing with Ed Flex, there is opportunity now, as we probably all know, with the Department of Education, to get some flexibility and some waivers in rules and regulations and how we expend funds. So we've been working with what we call School-wide, and that's really to get waivers so we can use our funding, particularly in those schools that have a high free and reduced lunch rate, where they're getting lots of federal dollars to support these extra programs. It used to be that those programs had to operate pretty much in isolation. And what we're trying to do is to take buildings through a year of planning where they step back and say, "How can we serve All kids, and meet All learners' need in our building? And how can we use all those special program funds in new and creative ways to make sure everybody is learning and everybody is getting their needs met?" So they're able to consolidate funding. We're an Ed Flex state and that means that we can apply those same conditions to schools who don't have high poverty levels in their building. So we're trying to get buildings to work on what does good education practice look like and how can we use resources more effectively. And we're going to include STC as part of that, so that we're always working on good educational practice, we're aligning our moneys, and we're using our moneys and resources together to have good education in a school instead of bunch of separate programs.
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): I think the way this is played out in Oregon is that the state Board of Education now has the authority to grant to a local district waiver of those federal requirements; it doesn't have to go back to the Secretary of Education to be processed, so it short cuts the time enormously.
Susan McAlonan (Colorado): Yes, and the paper work. Thank you Nancy.
Janice (California): Can I ask a quick follow up then? I think it was Oregon, you said that you could just put these pieces together for a single plan. How long do you think it will be, since you've had this for a few months before you can do something with shared funding?
Nancy Hargis (Oregon): Well, I think that it is going to take a least 18 months to have people actually work under these plans for them to really get a good sense of what works and what doesn't. We have predicated much of this on the assumption that there would be work force block grants for example, and so that would mean up in the air or wherever it may be at this point. I don't know, but I do think that it's going to take at least a full year of operation under these integrated plans for people to have any sense of what strategies makes sense and where the barriers really are.
Janice (California): Thank you.
Mary Mack (NTA/NTN): I think that we're going to have to end this now. It's been a quick hour, that's for sure. And I want to once again thank Bill, Nancy and Susan for participating. I'd like to tell you what are next two teleconferences are going to be. The next one is on the November the 19th, it'll be developing skills standards, academic standards and accountability systems that include youth with disabilities from Oregon's perspective. The following one will be December the 18th, and representatives from the Center for Law and Education will discuss legal tools for ensuring the inclusion of youth with disabilities in school to work. And all of them are accessible in the same way this and previous teleconferences have been accessed, and are in this time frame, from 1-2pm Central time. If you have questions regarding this teleconference, you may contact Teri Wallace. If you have questions regarding this transcript, please contact Megan Dushin (see info below). Also, we have this and other transcripts available on the National Transition Network website at http://www.ici.umn.edu/ntn. The National Transition Alliance website also lists other resources, products, partners, and more at http://www.aed.org/Transition/Alliance/NTA.html. Note that the two have links to each other, so accessing either one will enable you to access the other.
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:
URL: http://ici1.umn.edu/ntn/audio/1996/oct.html
Posted November 19, 1996
ncset@umn.edu
![NTN [logo]](../../images/ntnThL.gif)