How can school and agency personnel work together to support smooth transitions for these students?

Transcript: Rich Luecking, EdD

It’s best to refer to seamless transition as a sequential delivery of specific preparatory and coordinated services that begin early in high school and continue through post-school with the intended outcome of each student employed in an individualized integrated job of choice and/or enrolled in a post-secondary education prior to school exit. As they leave secondary school, they are already either employed or they’re enrolled in a post-secondary education program that will lead to further advancement of their career. They seamlessly leave school as a secondary school student and to the next phase of their life. There’s no interruption of service.

The most important predictor of post-school employment for youth with disabilities is whether or not they’ve achieved work experiences in some sort of paid employment prior to school exit. So it’s important that their secondary education include exposure to work experience which could include things like work sampling, career exploration visits to employers, and, most importantly, in jobs where they’re paid by an employer.

In fact, paid employment is the single-strongest predictor of post-school employment for youth with disabilities. So transition professionals and teachers who are working with these youth, the first thing that they can do to help seamless transition happen is expose youth to work experiences and jobs as an integral part of their transition experience. They might do that by incorporating these experiences into the curriculum or the educational service the students are receiving, or they might do it through collaboration with other community partners such as a community rehabilitation agency, or a vocational rehabilitation program so the educational experience is augmented by and complemented by including some sort of job experience. That also means that the teachers and transition professionals have to know about the other services and resources that might be available to help youth have these work experiences and jobs.

I’ll give you an example of a student who was served by a public school in Maryland. This young man between the ages of 18 and 21, when he exited school, had opportunities for several community-based work experiences. These work experiences included volunteering at a library and sampling tasks at a retail store and a restaurant. These experiences helped him develop work skills, and it helped him identify the best type of working environment that would be good for him and identified specific ways job coaching might help him learn and succeed in the workplace. The year before he was slated to exit school, he was referred to the vocational rehabilitation agency, which helped him find not one but two paid jobs where he worked during his entire last year of secondary school. When he officially ended his status as a student, he was already working. The first day after he exited school looked the same as the day before he exited school. In other words, he had the same jobs. He had the same adult agency supporting him to succeed in these jobs, and he hopes to continue in these jobs. This would be a seamless transition.

The transition coordinator worked together with the state vocational rehabilitation counselor, who identified a community rehabilitation agency that could provide the job search and the job coaching support. The vocational rehabilitation agency paid for that job development, in-job coaching support throughout the last year of school. When he exited school, as I mentioned, he was already employed. The teacher working together with the rehabilitation counselor, and the community rehabilitation agency helped to make this job happen.