Community Work Experience for Students
By Ellen Condon,
Project Coordinator
The Rural Institute
Can students with severe disabilities work in the community? Sure they can if we take the time to find out how best to support them and tap into their contributions!
In December of 1997 I met Lance and his family. Lance was 16 at the time and received special education services in a self-contained classroom with several other students with labels of "severe" disabilities. He had performed some informal work tasks at school like emptying trash from his classroom and bringing his classes's attendance slip to the school office but there wasn't a goal for him to perform these tasks independently. He had never had any formal work experience and his Individual Education Plan (IEP) team hadn't yet discussed work as a long term goal for him or what he would do after graduation.
Lance doesn't read, count, recognize numbers or letters, and the few words that he does use to communicate are difficult to understand. He needs support dressing, performing all personal hygiene routines including using the restroom, and he has always had 24 hour adult supervision at home and at school. The team lacked a vision of what he could do for employment. Although Lance's mom agreed immediately that Lance had something to offer and could become employed, not everyone was convinced that Lance was employable or that he had something to offer the business community.
In January of 1998, Lance and his family applied and were accepted to be participants in United Cerebral Palsy Association's (UCPA) Choice Access Project. The project offered money to people with physical disabilities to enable them to become employed. The unique feature of the project was that the person (or their family in Lance's case) had control over the money and could choose with whom to contract with, and what support they wanted or needed. Now that Lance and his family had access to money and could choose what support services they wanted and needed to get Lance a job, the questions became: What can he do? What would he like to do? What is he capable of? Would anyone hire him? Can he really work?
To find out what Lance could do, Wendy Holmes of the Bitterroot Special Education Cooperative, and Fred Petak, Lance's special education teacher completed an information gathering process called the Vocational Profile. The Profile is an alternative to the traditional vocational assessments and is a useful tool for people with more significant support needs. The Profile process starts with the assumption that everyone, regardless of the severity of their disability, can work in an individual paid job in the community.
The Cooperative staff and special education teacher spent about 50 hours gathering information from people who knew Lance well. They hung out with him at home, at school and in the community. They wanted to know what he liked, what he didn't like, what he did at home for jobs and for fun, what his family felt was important in a job for him, what supports he needed in various situations, what accommodations he might need in the work place, and who did he and his family know who might help us later find that "ideal job" for Lance. After all this information was compiled, the team reconvened to compose a list of: characteristics of the ideal job; conditions for employment, (factors which Lance and the family felt had to be present for a job to be acceptable); contribution that Lance had to offer; and a list of businesses which might have or could create a job that would match Lance's needs.
We all left that meeting with a list of tasks and ideas for potential jobs. We knew that Lance loved interacting with people, running errands, keeping active, going places in the car or school bus, and he was fascinated by big trucks. We also knew that his stamina for work would be low at first, that he would need to work in a location where he wouldn't be around traffic or other potential dangers, that his work tasks would need to be a combination of sitting and moving around, that he would need support to learn the job and ongoing support probably for the life of the job (which may or may not need to be provided by a paid support person). Although we had a lot more information about Lance, we still lacked that compelling vision of exactly what his job would be and what he could offer each employer that we would eventually be calling.
When we had completed the application for the UCPA Choice Project, I had noticed that Lance was not receiving the total available monthly amount of Supplemental Security Income through Social Security (an indication that he could be eligible for a PASS Plan, a work incentive program that Social Security offers to assist people to become employed). It turned out that this indeed was the case! We wrote a PASS plan for Lance and once approved, he was one of the first 3 students under the age of 18 in the U.S. to have an approved PASS. The PASS offered him an additional $250/month to use towards his vocational goals. The PASS was able to fund two paid community-based job trials, and augment job coaching provided by the school to enable Lance and his support staff to gain more information about his work skills and clarify a vision of that future job.
The first job Lance tried was at a local café in Darby, Montana. He passed out menus, greeted customers, put away dishes, and filled condiments. We learned that Lance wasn't shy around strangers. He liked putting things away and had a good memory for where things went. He had difficulty lifting the large ketchup container to refill the bottles, so he quickly lost interest in that task, and was distracted by windows that look out on traffic.
We weren't sure if Lance would understand the meaning of a paycheck at the end of a week so we arranged for him to get paid at the end of each day in cash. Lance had never really had an opportunity to learn what money was and what you could purchase with it, so we used this as a teaching opportunity. Beyond the daily trip to the pop machine at school where he used change, he hadn't made independent purchases. The job coach would hand him dollar bills at the end of his shift and explain that he had earned money for working. On the way home she would stop at the store to enable him to purchase something he liked with his wages.
Lance's next job trial was at Marcus Daly Hospital in Hamilton. He started out in the purchasing department placing stickers on inventory. He began working two days a week for up to one hour and eventually increased this to three to four days/week, up to two hours daily. Lance's production and quality increased throughout the job trial. We discovered that he was capable of quality control (placing the sticker accurately on the correct section of the item), but he wasn't all that interested in paying attention to the detail required to do this. He handled distractions much better than we had expected, and he worked much better if he knew exactly how much had to be completed before lunch. After about a month he seemed to become bored with the repetitive nature of the tasks. His favorite parts of the job were placing the finished product into the "done" basket and showing his supervisor all the work he had completed.
We were able to carve out another task for a job trial at the hospital, which involved pushing a cart from office to office and picking up paper that needed to be recycled. Lance enjoyed the increased movement and mobility involved in this task and was happy to interact with folks along the way. He learned the route very quickly and started doing portions of the task independently within days. He used an augmentative communication device to interact with people and needed more training or an adaptation to be able to accurately dump the individual boxes of paper into the main container. Unfortunately, this job trial ended after one week. What the recycling trial told us was that Lance's contribution was making deliveries where his outgoing personality would be valued and lots of quality control wasn't necessary. We now had our vision of the job where he would be successful—we just needed to find an employer who had that need. We reconvened our profile team, revisited what worked and what didn't work for Lance, agreed upon ideal characteristics of a job for Lance, and generated a new list of employers to contact.
Karen Hedges, the Job Developer began chasing leads for businesses that we thought were large enough to require inter-departmental deliveries; the court house, a medical lab, a local pharmacy and the US Forest Service. None of them panned out. We then changed how we were thinking about the delivery task. Were there several items or services that a Darby resident would be required to drive to Hamilton to get? Could Lance run a delivery service?
We thought of film processing, dry cleaning, and prescriptions. Unfortunately the photo store said that having an intermediary drop off film in the past hadn't been successful and we found that Darby did actually have a place where you could drop off dry cleaning. People suggested a service that would transport other people from Darby to the hospital for medical treatment on a weekly basis but we couldn't see that Lance would have much responsibility in such a service.
After many more brainstorming sessions we came up with the idea to look for a business that would need a delivery service. We called upon Vicki and Korly Stiller, owners of A Place to Ponder Bakery and Café in Hamilton. We talked to them about what Lance had to offer and asked if he could contribute something valuable to their business. They welcomed the idea. This September Lance will be starting a delivery service called "A Place to Ponder Comes to You!"
Marlene Disburg and Dave Hammis of the Rural Institute helped Lance get his second PASS plan approved; this plan will allow him to purchase and own a van, which he will use to make his deliveries. Funds through the UCPA grant were used to purchase equipment Lance needed such as a beverage cart to keep his sandwiches and pop cold as he makes deliveries, and a helium tank so he can sell balloons to people ordering birthday cakes from the bakery. There are also funds available through this project to pay for the first month of job coaching for Lance but now we need money for ongoing support until he is as independent as possible. Darby schools has offered him some job coach support and Lance has recently applied to Vocational Rehabilitation for additional funds for a job coach and to put a wheelchair lift in his van, which will enable him (on days when he needs his wheelchair and his cart) to get in and out of the van.
I doubt Lance will ever drive his own van and he will probably need some ongoing support on the job. However, he will be employed and he will be a contributing community member and tax payer. Our goal is that within one year of starting his business, Lance will be able to hire a driver who will be a business partner and will provide Lance with some support so that he no longer needs a paid job coach.
Lance and his team were really fortunate to be able to access all these funds, but I don't think that getting him employed was contingent on that amount of money. I believe that lack of financial constraints allowed all of us to get creative and think outside the box—which is really how we helped Lance become employed.