Marium’s Story
A Smooth Transition from School to Work
by Lynn Moses,
Transition Project Coordinator

Like many of her classmates, she started working a few hours a week during her last year of high school. When she graduated she was working at a local grocery store 15 hours a week, which soon grew to 20 hours. She says she really likes her job and her co-workers. So what’s the big deal about this story? Marium is a student with a disability. If the school hadn’t actively pursued employment as a transition goal for her, she may not have a job and would be waiting for services to help her find a job for a couple of years. Below is the story of how Marium’s transition team helped find her meaningful employment in the community while addressing her unique talents, interests, and support needs.

Marium moved to Montana in the summer of 2002 when she was 19. Her family didn’t realize that Montana State law allowed individual school districts to decide whether or not they wanted to serve students after the age of 19. The state they lived in previously provided school services for students through the age of 21, so they weren’t expecting anything different when they got here.

When school started in the fall, Marium got ready and headed off to school with her younger sisters. The school sent her home that same day and explained to the family that there must have been a misunderstanding. They didn’t serve students past the age of 19 - Marium was too old to go to school. The family and the school negotiated a compromise, the school would provide one year of schooling for Marium. The goal of this final year was to prepare her for life as an adult in the community. The question became: what does this look like?

The school quickly arranged for a job at a local grocery store where Marium worked facing the shelves for 2 hours a day, 3 days per week. She had a job coach who helped her learn the job and it quickly became a part of her routine. In addition to her community job, the school also arranged for Marium to do some school-based jobs in order to learn more about her interests and skills. While all of this was very positive, her transition team wanted to know what else they should be doing in preparation for Marium graduating in the spring. While their efforts filled her school day with great experiences, the focus of their efforts did not extend to a post-school outcome. What would her day look like when she no longer came to school?

Beyond General Work Experience
Marium’s transition team contacted the Rural Institute on Disabilities, which led to a collaborative approach to support Marium’s transition from school to adult life through her participation in the Linkages to Employment Project (a Transition project funded by the U.S. Department of Education). The goal of the Linkages to Employment Project is to promote individualized career planning activities that lead to long-term customized employment for students. Another component of the project is to utilize other resources such as Social Security Work Incentives, Workforce Investment Resources, and linkages to other adult agencies that may be able to support these activities as students graduate from school. Since Marium was in her last year of high school, the team knew that they needed to move quickly to make sure that Marium’s transition was a smooth one.

We started with the process of Discovery to better understand who Marium is as a unique person. Marium’s teacher attended the home visit and remarked about how much she learned about Marium, whom she thought she knew well, by spending some time with her at her home and talking with her parents. As a result of seeing some of the artwork and woodworking projects that Marium had completed at the previous high school, Marium’s teacher quickly arranged for her to get into an art class at school so she could continue to pursue activities that she was interested in.

Some of the team members also spent time with Marium in the community to continue to learn more about Marium and what support needs she might have in a new working environment. Marium’s team accompanied her once when getting her hair styled. They knew this was something that was familiar to Marium and something that she enjoyed, which would most likely show Marium at her best. At the appointment, the hairstylist asked her how she wanted her hair styled; Marium said nothing, she just smiled. Once the hairstylist started curling her hair, it became clear that Marium didn’t like the way it looked because she was shaking her head back and forth and was frowning, but she still didn’t say anything even when asked. Once the hairstylist finished and combed her hair out, Marium began to smile and would shake her head yes when asked if she liked her new hairstyle. While this story might seem simple, there is a wealth of information about Marium’s style of communication and potential support needs. Marium is often very quiet, especially in new situations, but also in familiar ones. She usually won’t initiate conversation with others or tell them if she needs something. This type of information helped her team to facilitate interactions between Marium and her new employer and coworkers to assist them to understand Marium so they don’t misinterpret her communication and to enable them to utilize other means of interacting with her and supporting her.

The New Employment Plan
After several Discovery activities and completing her Vocational Profile, the team organized Marium’s Employment Planning Meeting. Even though Marium was already working we felt it was important to have the meeting to look at truly customized jobs. What we discovered was that the job at the grocery store was a good match for Marium, and was now a part of her routine, which is very important for her. Her team discussed looking at other jobs, but kept coming back to how well this job was working for her, how well she liked it, and how well it was working with the employer. What we did realize as a result of the planning meeting was that Marium had much more potential than she was using at her job. We started to explore other tasks that she could do for the store. Her employer was at the meeting and was able to tell us if they had a need for the tasks to be performed that we were identifying Marium could do. By the end of the meeting we had a plan to increase her tasks from dusting and facing shelves to checking in and returning videos, watering the plants in the greenhouse, simple food prep, wrapping food in the deli, and bagging groceries. This also led to increasing her hours gradually from 6 to 20 hours per week by the beginning of the summer.

The team knew that Marium was capable of all of these tasks, but that she would need some initial job coaching for the new tasks and some careful transition planning to phase out school supports as the school would soon no longer be providing the job coach that Marium had become accustomed to. Marium had already qualified for Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) Services and was eligible for some funding for time-limited job coaching. The family chose the local adult services employment vendor with whom VR would contract and the agency began working with Marium and the school before she graduated. The plan was to increase her hours, job coach her on new tasks, and then start fading the job coaching so she could do the job independently with the natural supports her work environment offered.

It worked beautifully! By the time graduation rolled around, Marium was working every day of the week for 3 hours a day. The school was done providing job coaching, but because they had slowly been fading the coaching and talking with the employer about how to support Marium, she was completely independent on her job with her new tasks. The adult services employment specialist was able to simply check in with her and the employer once a week. By this time the employer knew Marium’s strengths and support needs very well and felt completely comfortable supporting her as she needed. Marium now works 20 hours per week independently.

Vocational Rehabilitation will monitor her for 90 days to make sure she can work without any additional supports. When she is stable, VR can close the case, but Marium and her family can ask them to re-open it in the future if she needs assistance with obtaining a new job or needs additional training on the current job. Marium is also now eligible for a PASS (Plan for Achieving Self-Support) because her wages are impacting how much she gets each month from Social Security. She can use her PASS to fund transportation, on-going supports she might have, education related to improving her skills for her job or a future job goal, or other equipment and services that will help her maintain employment.

What Might Have Happened Without Collaboration?
While the school did an excellent job initially of finding Marium community-based employment as a part of her transition preparation, all of the players were necessary to create the quality long term outcome - a job that utilized Marium’s best skills, an ongoing plan of supporting her on the job, and resources that could be used to further support her in maintaining employment (the PASS plan).

Without spending time performing Discovery to learn more about Marium, and capturing this information in the Vocational Profile document, the team may not have fully understood Marium’s unique interests, contributions, and support needs. Marium could have been limited to facing shelves 6 hours a week, and not working to her full potential. Worse yet, if any challenges arose at the worksite, without needed supports in place she may have lost her job.

The Discovery process led the team to visualize what her workday could and should look like after graduation. This vision helped the team address the need of a smooth transition from school supports to coworker supports, and to create that reality of the ideal day prior to graduation. If this did not happen, the worst case scenario could have been the job coaching from the school ending abruptly at graduation without any plan for continued supports or connections with agencies and negotiations with the job site for long-term employment and the employer might not have fully understood how to work with Marium or that she was capable of working independently with a few natural supports.

The early involvement and funding through VR promoted the collaboration between the school and the adult employment agency and encouraged the school to focus on achieving a permanent placement for Marium prior to graduation from high school rather than merely offering her a time limited work experience. If she hadn’t been supported as part of her transition activities to find and learn a job prior to graduation, she most likely would have been placed on a waiting list for these services and been sitting at home until an opening came about. In some parts of the state that waiting list has reached 10 years. Sadly, that could have resulted in the loss of valuable skills gained in high school not to mention the boredom and depression that often is associated with not working.

Marium is currently on the waiting list for services through Developmental Disabilities, which includes supported employment, but she may not receive those services for several years. In the meantime, Marium is already working at a job she likes.

Fortunately for Marium her story is a positive one. She had the dedication of her family and school, both or whom realized that employment is just as important for a student with disabilities as it is for any other student. The school realized they had a role in developing this job for her, that it needed to be customized, and that there were resources available to help. She has accessed some services through agencies that are realizing that if they get involved earlier and collaborate with schools it improves the employment outcomes for students and actually makes a less expensive and much simpler successful outcome for their agency.

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