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Paula
Kohler: Welcome to today's audio conference
call, Proactive Approaches to Serving Youth with
Disabilities in School-to-Work Systems. I'll
introduce our presenters, and then they will take the
next fifteen to thirty minutes and provide us an overview
of their programs. At that time, we'll open it up to
questions from our call-in audience. We have two projects that are presenting
today. I'd like to introduce participants and
coordinators of the S-4 Student Self Survival Project
from Millburn, New Jersey. With us today are Daphne
Gregory, the Transition Coordinator, and Steven Keisman,
an internship coordinator with this project. In addition,
we have Karlton Ballard from the SCANS Lab Project from
the Pinellas County Schools in Largo, Florida.
We'll begin with the S-4 Student
Self Survival Project. Daphne and Steven have some
students with them who have been involved in the project.
Daphne Gregory: The
two guests we have with us today are Suzanne Matzkin and
Rich Rosenblatt. You'll be hearing from them a little bit
later.
In 1993, I had the opportunity
to come to Millburn High School, which is best known for
the numbers of students who move on to the Ivy League
Schools and first tier universities. I was asked to
develop a program that would assist the sometimes
forgotten students in this school, those students with
learning disabilities and other at-risk issues. I was
asked to develop a program to help them make more
informed choices about their daily and future life. In
other words, my charge was to develop a transition
program. I want to point out that the support I received
from the Principal, Keith Neigel, the Assistant
Superintendent, Phyllis, and the entire district truly
helped to make a difference in launching this initiative.
I began by developing a self
awareness and career awareness program for classified
high school students, which, in retrospect, was the
foundation for S-4, the Student Self Survival Skills
Project. The focus of the program was to help students
identify their interests, strengths, challenges, values,
and experiences and to build upon those things. The
continuum of what is now known as S-4 began with the
critical piece of helping students identify their
learning disabilities first. That, I felt, was critical.
Once they moved through that phase and began to feel more
comfortable with their disabilities, the students began
to explore other issues - some special education and some
non-special education topics - in an effort to better
understand who they are as a whole.
Some of the areas that I cover
in the self awareness program are, again, identifying
learning disabilities, physiology of the brain, left and
right brain thinking, memory; learning styles, emotional
intelligence, the classification process, roles of the
child study team members, various laws (i.e., PL 94142
and IDEA [sic]), and the rights and responsibilities of
students with learning disabilities according to those
laws.
Then comes, what I believe is a
critical point in the program, self advocacy. I always
encourage students in the program to begin speaking up
for themselves about their disabilities, and that was a
natural outgrowth of the whole self awareness process.
Eventually some of the students began to advocate for
themselves in a collective way by sharing as a group
their knowledge, experiences, frustrations, and
strategies with teachers, parents, friends, and members
of the community. The original self advocacy group, and
that was four or five years ago, consisted of eight
students who developed a really wonderful presentation
which they gave at a teachers' in-service day in another
district. They felt it was kind of difficult to do it in
their own district first. They talked about their
disabilities and the strategies that people could use in
working with them, and they really advocated for
themselves.
The presentation was
overwhelmingly successful, and requests for the students
to speak began pouring in from all over. People heard
about them and called requesting the students to speak at
their organizations. So many districts throughout the
area began hearing about this and wanted to find out how
they could initiate similar programs for their students.
And what developed is something really we're very proud
of.
To allow even more schools to
expose their students to this type of experience, Bob
Haugh, the Transition Project Director for the State of
New Jersey's Department of Education, Office of Special
Education Programs, asked us to organize and present two
statewide conferences during the last school year at two
New Jersey colleges known for their strong programs for
students with disabilities. As it turns out, it was
highly popular. Fifty-eight schools, more than 500
students with varying disabilities, and more than 150
professionals attended. Even more incredible than the
number of people who attended both conferences was the
fact that the conferences and the related workshops were
completely designed and facilitated by the students
themselves. We had very little to do with it except the
paperwork and the organization of getting people there.
The state funded the whole thing, including lunch and
breakfast for the students. Actually, this year Bob Haugh
and Bill Freeman, Transition Program Specialist for the
New Jersey Department of Education, earmarked funding for
six additional statewide student self advocacy
conferences, and those are being planned right now.
While the Millburn High School
transition program was shaping up to be really quite
successful, I felt it wasn't enough. Now that many of the
students were starting to understand who they really were
for the first time and beginning to advocate for
themselves, I knew I had to develop more that would
assist them in making more informed career and post
secondary choices. I also believe that education should
not be limited to the four walls of school buildings, and
that community-based education was the key. So I wanted
to begin an internship program and somehow integrate it
into the transition services I was providing. And
although I was really interested in getting something
like this off the ground, I clearly did not have the
knowledge and expertise necessary to navigate through the
various intricacies of a program that this nature would
entail.
By coincidence, in 1995 I met
Steve Keisman who was a resident of Millburn, and at that
time Steve had more than thirteen years of internship
program development and had begun National Education
Management Consultants in a consulting firm specializing
in creative approaches to transition services. I was
immediately taken with how similar our educational
philosophy and energy and dedication were, and at this
point I'm going to let Steve tell you about what happened
next.
Steven Keisman: Well,
I was excited by the possibilities. Combining our
experiences, as well as our philosophy and belief in
education, Daphne and I had several conversations about
what was missing in the transition program that she had
begun at Millburn High School. What was most exciting to
me about connecting with Daphne was that in the many
years of school-to-career work that I have been part of,
I was continually frustrated that students, especially
those with disabilities, weren't taught better skills or
given more preparation before being put into experiential
learning situations. My thought was that with higher
level career readiness skills, the students would be able
to secure more advanced school-to-career placements which
would lead to greater success, knowledge, experience, and
contacts, thereby making them better prepared to live and
work as independent, productive, and successful adults in
the real world. I felt that this was the needed
connection for a successful transition from high school
to post secondary life. As a result, we developed S-4,
the Student Self Survival Skills Project, which
integrated Daphne's original program and my expansion of
the program into a more refined transition process. S-4
reflects the incremental format that we use. What it
really does is moves the students through the various
stages of self awareness, self advocacy, career
awareness, and into a meaningful community based
educational experience through the school-to-career
internship program that I developed. We like to think of
the school-to-career experience as the crown jewel, if
you will, of Millburn High School's S-4 transition
program.
What's interesting is that the
original school-to-career program design that we had was
only for students with disabilities. However, many
students who were not classified heard the tremendously
successful experiences that the special education interns
were having and began to request a similar opportunity.
So we decided to put together an inclusive program that
would benefit all students, those with and without
disabilities.
It turned out that we were
right. An inclusive program of this nature truly leveled
the playing field in some students' cases for the very
first time. Therefore, senior students with and without
disabilities are accepted if appropriate. In fact, we
have two students here today who you will hear from
shortly, one of whom is a classified student, and one who
is not. The school-to-career internship component begins
with an assessment of the student's individual career
interests and abilities. We look at their values, their
experiences, and even their personality type. This
information is integrated, and a career cluster is
identified. I then meet with the students for a face to
face interview. With this information, an appropriate
career match is made. Students are then provided with an
orientation meeting where they learn interviewing
techniques and resume writing skills. With resumes and
the strategies with which they have been provided, we
then feel that they are ready to go out into the field
for interviews for possible placement. The internship
component, I want to point out, is curriculum driven and
uses a portfolio based design. Students leave for all or
part of the day during their entire second semester of
their senior year to work at a carefully matched and
monitored internship site. It should be pointed out that
on-site mentors are interviewed and they receive basic
mentoring training before we place any students on site.
Students work for credit instead of pay. They leave their
traditional classes for their internship site, and we
work with not only the students, but with their teachers
and their work site mentors in developing all curriculum
and assignments in the content area that are based on the
student's specific internship experiences.
For example, last year we had a
student on the floor of the New York Mercantile and
Commodities Exchange in Manhattan, and he was helping to
trade sugar and cocoa futures. To receive economics
credits, he had to research and trace the path of sugar
from the fields to the table. For math credit, he had to
chart and graph the price fluctuations of cocoa in
relation to weather conditions. May I add that this is a
student who had great difficulties in passing these
subjects in a traditional setting, but who was quite
successful in acquiring and applying this knowledge in a
real world situation.
Speaking of math, we had another
student who was classified that could barely pass math in
the classroom, but as an intern in a national wildlife
refuge, he was doing statistical surveys of migratory
water foul for the federal government and loving it.
There is a once a week school component that consists of
an advisory seminar that we include in this program, and
with the help of guest speakers and field trips, this
allowed the students in the program to further
investigate career and personal exploration topics. It is
also a time when students meet with their academic
advisors and take care of record keeping responsibilities
as well. We also developed a strong school to business
partnership with the local Chamber of Commerce here in
the Millburn Shore Hills area of New Jersey, and that has
proven to be very successful in many ways. As a result,
we have many student interns placed throughout the
community as well as local chamber members coming into
the school for classroom presentations and curriculum
development activities.
Daphne Gregory:
I just want to say that some of our internship placements
for all of the students with and without disabilities
have been truly incredible. We've had students interning
at law firms, hotels, the floor of the New York Stock
Exchange, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, radio stations,
brokerage firms, interior design firms, theaters, and
more. The list just goes on and on. Last year we had a
student at a local art gallery who had to do a project.
Each of the students has to do a project. For his project
he decided to run a ten-day high school art show, and the
entire community became involved in it: The Chamber of
Commerce, the school, the administrators, the mayor. It
was really a special day for all of us because it really
brought home all that we've been trying to do.
So we're going to turn you over
to the students in a minute. They've participated in
various parts of S-4. As we've said, we have one student
who is classified, one who is not, and they will briefly
share with you some of their experiences. First we have
Suzanne Matzkin, and she will tell you a little bit about
her experience.
Suzanne Matzkin: I
was at the Hilton Shore Hills, and the career area was
hotel management. In the beginning, I was just a regular
phone operator, you could say. But after about a month or
so of being there I learned the way around. I started
learning their computer systems. I learned how to do
reservations, and basically I feel I was a key part of
the front office team. For my project, it was kind of
different than everyone else's. We had a lot of problems
in the front office with training. Not everyone really
felt they were having the training that they deserved or
needed to do their job. So what I made was a training
outline comment sheet, and basically there were about ten
questions. You had to rate it from one to five, one being
the lowest, five being the highest on different parts of
training for the front office. It was a big hit. I was
invited to come to a meeting with all the directors and
the general managers of each department, and it was
introduced. It was a big hit, and after that it was
circulated throughout the whole hotel.
Daphne Gregory: Great.
Rich?
Rich Rosenblatt: This
summer I worked on the floor of the New York Stock
Exchange for a company named Polcari/Weicker. They're a
division of Garban Corporates, a large investment
corporation. But they are a small fledgling division of
the company whose job is wholesale buying and selling of
stocks on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I was
an assistant clerk on the floor working under my mentor
John Corpina. That entailed anything from the usual
running. I delivered messages. The floor of the New York
Stock Exchange is a very fast moving place. They needed
me for a lot of running in the beginning, but as you
become more acquainted with the way things worked on the
floor, I began to understand how to document. That was a
big part of my job, helping to speed up their job by
documenting their trades and such. My job was doing
research to find large tax, high volume, high activity
organizations in which they could use as clients to use
stock trade.
Paula Kohler: Great.
Well, we're going to come back to you in just a minute.
Next we're going to hear from the LINC Pinellas Scans Lab
Project, and with us today we have Karlton Ballard, the
Project Manager. Karlton, if you can spend ten to fifteen
minutes to share a bit of history about your project,
that'd be great.
Karlton Ballard:
All right. I'd like to also say that I have with me Judy
Gibbs, our transition liaison. Our project is part of the
Florida Blueprint for School to Community Transition. We
started out about five years ago and decided that we
needed to address the needs of our ESE students in the
transition area. We saw a deficit in the areas of
students graduating from high school, obtaining
competitive employment, receiving special diplomas,
standard diplomas, and participating in secondary regular
vocational programs. We have developed what we call the
SCANS Lab. It is an innovative school-to-work technology
career exploration lab that is housed at an adult service
provider agency called Abilities of Florida. We currently
serve four high schools at that facility. Four high
schools transport students to the SCANS Lab for a morning
session and an afternoon session. Two schools come in the
morning and two schools come in the afternoon. The
students come to the SCANS Lab, and the first thing that
we like for them to do is get an assessment. They go to
our Career Assessment Center here in Pinellas County
during the middle part of the semester. The students
address the SCANS competencies.
Now, I don't know if all of our
listeners are familiar with the SCANS competencies, but
I'll just mention them: Resources, information,
interpersonal, systems and technology. All of the
competencies are interrelated, and all of the lab
activities are integrated into the competencies. A lot of
time is spent building self-esteem, developing teaming
skills, and letting the students explore their own
weaknesses and strengths. Toward the end of the semester,
the students either have work experience, or they do some
program shadowing at our secondary technical institutes,
or other kinds of job shadowing in the community
depending on the student's needs.
At the end of the semester, the
students have a Transition Planning Meeting, which they
will have been preparing for throughout the semester. The
Transition Planning Meeting is similar to an IEP meeting.
Students facilitate their own transition planning
meetings, and I feel that this is the highlight of our
program because the students are able to express and put
into a real plan what they feel their future is. Of
course, we will have been working on that all during the
semester.
Another important part of the
SCANS Lab is the curriculum that the students address all
during the semester, and we have an extensive curriculum
and no one semester is exactly the same as the one
before. Now, another important component of our SCANS Lab
is our transition liaison. Because we saw such a need for
our students to connect with adult service provider
agencies, especially the Department of Vocational
Rehabilitation, we developed a position titled transition
liaison. I'm going to let Judy talk just a little bit
about her role in the SCANS Lab.
Judy Gibbs: Hi.
A very important part of the SCANS Lab is the follow-up,
and, as Karlton mentioned, we've had five years behind us
and I'm still carefully tracking all one hundred and
sixty-one students who have been through the program
finding out where they are, and what they're doing. With
the students who are currently enrolled in the SCANS Lab,
I work one on one with them finding out their interests
and getting them set up for their different evaluations.
Depending upon their area of interest, I arrange to have
guest speakers come in. I also take the students
individually or in groups to either job shadow or visit
programs and this creates a one to one experience. This
year, the beginning of the fifth or sixth year, we now
have another school that has arranged to have a SCANS Lab
on site, so the students don't have to be transported
like the four schools do to our other SCANS Lab. This is
an in-house SCANS Lab for the students of this high
school. We've also started to develop an inclusion
program that deals with students with and without
disabilities. This is proving very exciting and it's
still in the beginning stage. But, as Karlton also said,
as the transition liaison, I follow all the way through,
and I don't know when that will ever stop.
Karlton Ballard: Hopefully
never.
Judy Gibbs:
Yeah.
Karlton Ballard: I
think it was interesting when we were listening to the
other guests who were talking about their program. We
started out exclusively as an ESE program, but what we
found is as people came through our SCANS Lab and viewed
what we were doing, the single most frequent comment that
we heard was, that all students should have access to
this program. When we started examining expansion of our
SCANS Lab and how we were going to sustain ourselves in
the future after the grant was over, we examined all the
areas and decided that we do need to make this an
inclusion model. In fact, our new SCANS - we now have two
in the district -, is an inclusion model. We are having
secondary ESE students, as well as regular education
students come through the lab. Of course, we have a whole
schedule that's set up for that. It's difficult to
explain all the logistics on a teleconference call, but
it seems like it's going to work well. We do have a team
teaching model in one of our inclusion classes. We have
about twenty-eight students. One-third of those is ESE's,
so we feel like it's a real good mix. We have a regular
technology vocational teacher who teams with the regular
ESE teacher, so it seems like it's going to be a very
good model.
We have on the drawing board
plans to open another SCANS Lab in North County. If
you're not familiar with Pinellas County, we should
explain that our county is huge, so getting from one end
to the other is almost a day's trip. We do need more than
one of anything to serve all of our students in Pinellas
County. We've had extremely good outcomes for our
students, which is why the district decided to go ahead
and fund our second lab this year.
I'd like to point out, too, that
we do have partner agencies in our grant. At this time
there are five partner agencies: St. Petersburg Junior
College, Caring and Sharing Center for Independent
Living, Pinellas County Schools, Abilities of Florida,
and the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation. All of
these partner agencies have agreed to maintain themselves
and to continue to support our efforts in this area even
though our first grant has ended as of September 30th.
Now, we're looking to expand again, and we hope that our
agencies will continue to support us, since they've seen
the results of the lab that we've had for the past four
years. It's very important, I think, to have parents
involved, so we have a Transition Team that has outside
agencies that represent us, as well as parents and
students who sit on that board, and this has proved very
effective also.
Judy Gibbs: The
business members.
Karlton Ballard:
Yes, and also members of our business community.
Paula Kohler:
Okay. That's great. Thank you, Karlton and Judy.
So let's open it up now to our
audience. Does anybody have a question?
Participant: I
was curious. The students who went on somewhat extended
and adventuresome learning experiences, would those have
been possible through any other organization, or was this
it? It happened because of this group?
Rich Rosenblatt:
Not at all. When I found out about this process, I was
looking for a job at the mall. I had a couple of friends
that had internships around that were not in this
program, but by and large the best internships and the
most frequent internships were in this program. Most of
my other friends were working at camps and what not. And,
I tell you, my internship was as good as any internship
that any of my friends who were not part of the program
had.
Suzanne Matzkin: I
really didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do with
my life. I invited Ms. Gregory to my IEP meeting, and she
had brought it up because I had done the computer
process, which is one of the first steps you do for the
internship program, basically to know where you would be
placed in an internship program. So Ms. Gregory brought
it up and she basically got me the interview. I had a job
there before I was an intern, and then it became an
internship, and now I know where I want to go to school.
Now I’m going to major in hotel management because
of this internship.
Participant:
That’s great. Thanks.
Participant:
I’m calling from Atlanta, Georgia. Has this program
experimented with students with more severe disabilities?
Daphne Gregory: Yes.
We have students with all ranges of disabilities. In
fact, I heard the second presenters talking about using
community agencies. We have students in the program who
need actual job coaches, and who need connection with our
Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services here in
the State of New Jersey, and they’ve been wonderful.
Nancy Sher is the DVR program planner and transition
specialist and she’s provided each of our districts
in the state with DVR people. So we meet all together, we
work with DVR, and we work with job coaching agencies for
students who when we put them out there, we put them
through the same process. They have career assessments.
They have inventories. Sometimes if they can’t read
them, we read them to them. We also have them put
together resumes. Every student goes through the same
self awareness process that starts at the beginning of
S-4. Once we find a placement, we then have more support
on the placement. We have job coaches assisting students
through the process on the job. And, in fact, at
Suzanne’s placement we have a student there who had
a job coach for a long time and didn’t need that
person anymore.
And, secondly, we followed
through with DVR. We had a student who graduated last
year who went through this process, and I connected with
the DVR reps just yesterday and they are moving him
further along. He is now interviewing for another job in
another place. In other words, it was a seamless
transition. Through the job coaching agencies and the DVR
reps, we’re able to take students with more
significant disabilities and keep them with the same
people once they graduate. And that really is very
helpful. But, yes, we do have students with more
significant disabilities.
Steven Keisman: And
also I’d like to point out that in addition
they’re required to do the same types of curriculum
projects, and that’s one of the reasons we use a
portfolio assessment project, because all of the students
are able to handle the same assignments across the board.
Participant:
Right. Thank you.
Participant:
You mentioned something called job coach agencies. Where
do you find those?
Daphne Gregory: There
are supportive employment agencies throughout our state
anyway. We use Our House, but there are Project Hire and
The Arc. There are lots of supportive employment
agencies. They have job coaches, and they also do their
own assessments. They do a lot more of the functional
assessments for us, and we contract those job coaches
through those agencies.
We pick those particular
agencies because we want agencies that also work with the
adult population that are DVR connected. That way, when
the student ages out, leaves the high school, nothing
changes with the job coaches except the funding. We pay
the job coaches through these agencies while they’re
in high school, and then the coaches stay the same, the
agencies stay the same. It’s just that DVR pays the
bill. So job coaches are available in our state through
the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation.
Steven Keisman: And
also I’ve seen a number of them listed on the
Internet. You might want to do a search with the state
that you’re interested in having them connect to you
under supportive job agencies as well.
Judy Gibbs: In
Florida job coaching begins in the school district. We
have school district level job coaches for the students
who are in the pre-transitioning process, and then if
supported employment is required after they leave high
school, the student goes into a job coaching supported
employment situation through an adult service agency. Our
district has a rather large supply of job coaches.
Paula Kohler: If
you’re looking at a contact to seek out information
about employment specialists or job coaches, you might
start with your vocational rehabilitation agency. They
would likely be aware of organizations that provide those
services, because very often those services are funded
through rehabilitation.
Participant: I
have a question. I work primarily with a deaf population
of students, and we’re in the process of trying to
set up a career center here in Brattleboro, Vermont.
I’m wondering – some schools have assessments,
but they don’t quite work. It sounds like you feel
like yours really works. Is there something you feel is
particularly unique about it that makes it successful?
Karlton Ballard:
Well, in Pinellas County, Florida we have several
different methods of assessing our students. We use our
SCANS Lab only as one way of assessing through learning
styles, inventories, and career interests surveys. We
also do some adult basic education testing, and we have
access to a career assessment center in Pinellas County
that has a hands-on work evaluation assessment that I
think is particularly effective. It gives the students
some idea about what their strengths and weaknesses are,
and in what direction they might be headed.
Judy Gibbs: For
those people more severely involved with varying
disabilities, there are other work evaluations that are
provided through ARC or through Abilities. The work
evaluation is on different levels so that people with
hearing impairments or visual impairments can have the
same opportunities to examine their strengths, but just
in a different context.
Karlton Ballard: I
would also make the comment that when you’re dealing
with secondary students, we find that most don’t
want to take time to do pencil and paper assessments. We
try to do as much hands-on as possible.
Daphne Gregory: In
Millburn, all of the materials that I use with the
students are kept in a career portfolio. This includes a
piece I use in the eighth grade, a Positive Student
Profile, which is the first piece of information I get
from the students which has them articulate what they
believe would be appropriate for them right from the
eighth grade. That portfolio follows them through the
high school. When it’s time for us to do what we
would think of as a traditional career assessment,
we’ve done some pencil and paper things along the
way, and they’re fine. And you can find a lot of
those in different books of all varying levels. But the
most critical assessment that we do is one that’s on
the computer, as Rich mentioned. For students who cannot
read or see, we will use an interpreter – a lot of
the students can take it at the computer, and they really
enjoy it. It’s a program that assesses their
interests, their abilities, their values – which I
think is one of the most critical pieces – and their
experiences. Then it integrates all four of those
assessments and comes up with an appropriate career
cluster. So we take that information (and some other
pencil and papers things) and, again, sometimes we
interpret the questions, as well as the student’s
answers. But I haven’t had a student yet – and
we’ve worked with students of all abilities –
who has not been able to manage this computer program,
the Discover Program. There are many other components to
it, but of course, in terms of career assessment that is
a critical piece.
Steven Keisman: We
also use an adaptation of the Meyers Briggs Type
Indicator that David Kiersey offers in a book called
Please Understand Me II. We find this to be incredibly
invaluable as well, and that might be helpful for you
folks in Vermont, too.
Participant:
Thank you.
Participant: At
least one of the projects, maybe both, mentioned that
they do follow-up activities. What data do you have about
students who have gone on from school in terms of what
they’ve done afterward in either jobs or post
secondary education?
Judy Gibbs:
I’ve kept a data base here in Florida, and of the
168 students, 69 have graduated, 69 are still enrolled in
high school, 23 withdrew. Out of graduates, 30.4% are
working; 24.6% are enrolled in the Pinellas Technical
Education Center in various technologies such as auto
body, soldering, culinary arts, upholstery. Another 17.4%
are at different vocational training centers in the area.
I had five students, 7.2% who went on to junior college,
one in the military, one who is still with a job coach. I
have 12 students out of 161 who I’ve totally lost
track of. 82% of the graduates are either working or
continuing their education and training.
Participant:
Thank you.
Karlton Ballard:
I think that that’s one of the reasons that we were
able to afford and fund the second Scans Lab, because our
district looked at the phenomenal outcomes for the last
four years. Our success rate has been far above the state
in every area.
Of course, there are probably
other reasons for that, one of which is we do have a
small program and a small number of students that we work
with. Because we have served a wide spectrum of
disabilities, we feel our outcomes have been really
excellent.
Daphne Gregory: We
don’t have the figures of follow-up data in Millburn
here in the office. But I can tell you that of the
students who have gone through the entire S-4 process and
the internship program, I only know of one who is no
longer in school or working at this point. And he had a
lot of other at-risk issues that he was dealing with. But
all of our students are in post secondary settings,
typical education settings, several are working, and
several are in the military.
I would like to emphasize that
the students who were the pioneers of the speakers bureau
and who began the self advocacy piece in the S-4 process,
have come back to me and said that they were able to
advocate for themselves in all situations. It had helped
them with their success in being able to talk to their
employers and disclose that they have different
disabilities. Even to their teachers or whomever
they’re working with. That’s been a really big
help for them and really has counted a lot in their
success. We’re really happy that the students are
able to walk away with that skill as well.
Karlton Ballard:
I’d like to make one other comment about that. One
reason we think the transition liaison is such an
important part of our whole project is that we don’t
just follow those students until they graduate and leave
high school. We’re following them after they’ve
left high school and either gotten a job or gone into a
vocational program. Research has shown that those two
years after students graduate from high school are very
critical, and a lot of our students will fall two or
three times before they actually find out what they want
to do and are successful. So our transition liaison has
been able to go in there and help them find out what they
want to do and say, “How are you doing? Do you need
help? Is there someone I need to talk to?”
We’re hoping that we’ll be able to continue
this position as we go on because we feel it’s very
important.
Paula Kohler: Let
me ask you a question then. How do you fund that
position? Did you fund that initially through your
systems change project?
Karlton Ballard:
Yes. Department of Vocational Rehabilitation, Department
of Labor funded this position initially.
Paula Kohler: I
guess a question that people would be interested in is
what are the plans for continuing that position, and with
what funds?
Karlton Ballard: Well,
the Pinellas County School district is currently funding
the position. We only have one transition liaison
position now, and we need four or five to really serve
our district if we continue to expand. We’re looking
at other funding sources, and we will be writing some
grants and looking in other areas to figure ways that we
can continue.
Paula Kohler: In
Florida, the districts are organized according to county
structure. Can you give people an idea of the number of,
say, high schools that you have in your district and the
number of students?
Karlton Ballard: Yes.
We have a huge district here. We have 16 high schools,
and right now with our SCANS Lab, LINC Pinellas Project,
we’re serving five schools.
Now, in either January or August of ‘99, we will
start serving two other schools. So, we’ve got a
long way to go as far as serving our whole county, much
less the whole state. However, our project has been
duplicated in at least one other district, Pasco County,
which is a neighboring county.
Daphne Gregory:
In New Jersey we don’t have districts as large as
that. The district is pretty exclusive to the town. We do
have some regional districts. But, as in Florida, many
districts are looking to replicate such programs. Again,
the State Department of Education, the Office of Special
Education Programs, has really been terrific in funding
training, workshops, and conferences. Steve is someone
who is one of the trainers in that area, and I also work
with students. We have students training students in the
self advocacy area, but Steve is involved as one of the
trainers, as are some other people in training districts
to replicate the program.
Paula Kohler: Great.
I think we probably have time for one more question, a
very brief question.
Participant: I
was wondering about the student internships in Millburn.
Were those paid internships? And, if so, were they paid
by the employer or through JTPA funds or –
Steven Keisman:
One of the parts of the design of the program here in
Millburn is that they’re unpaid internships, and we
have it set up that way for several reasons. Firstly,
what happens is instead of the students getting paid in
cash, they get paid in credits because of the type of
curriculum that we have set up. It’s individualized
for every student in the program. They get paid in
credits, not in cash. And as a result of them not being
paid, it opens up more doors and opportunities than some
of the paid internships might offer.
Daphne Gregory: I
will tell you, though, a lot of our unpaid interns, when
the internship is over, they’ve done such a good job
that a lot of companies hire them on. And we actually
have students who, if they’re away for school
experience, when they come back each summer, they will
get that job back again. So a lot of them did turn into
jobs.
Steven Keisman: Also
the employers pay for their lunch and transportation
costs as well.
Karlton Ballard:
Can I just make one comment about our community based
instruction program in Florida? As a part of our SCANS
Program, we have a work based experience that’s
similar to a community based instruction program, except
it’s for a short period of time. But all of our high
schools and middle schools in Pinellas County – I
don’t know how many middle schools we have, but we
have 16 high schools - have community based instruction
programs that are unpaid positions for students while
they’re receiving credit in school.
Paula Kohler:
Great. Unfortunately our time is just about up, and I
think we need to wrap up our call. Now, we would just
like to thank, again, the folks from the S-4 Student Self
Survival Project, Daphne, Steven and the students there
with them, and also Karlton and Judy in Florida at LINC
Pinellas. Thank you so much for your presentations and
your responses to questions that people have asked. It
has been real informative.
[Editor’s note:
Presenters agreed to provide their contact information
with this transcript. Please free to contact them with
your questions.]
Daphne Gregory, Transition
Coordinator
Steve Keisman, Internship Coordinator
S-4 Student Self-Survival Project
Millburn High School
462 Millburn Ave
Millburn, NJ 07041
Phone (973) 376-3600 ext. 373 for Daphne,
ext. 379 for Steve
Karlton Ballard, Project Manager
Judy Gibbs, Transition Liaison
LINC Pinellas – SCANS Lab Project
Exceptional Student Education
301 4th St. SW
PO Box 2942
Largo, FL 33779-2942
Phone (727) 588-6540
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