Achieving Meaningful Employment for Youth with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: High School Transition the Project SEARCH Way
Erin Reihle
Transcription provided by: Caption First, Inc.
ERIN REIHLE:Hi. My name's Erin Reihle, and I'm going to be talking to you about Project SEARCH which is a high school transition program that we developed about 16 years ago.
So, essentially, just to let you know I am and how this presentation is going to go, the presentation is called "Achieving Meaningful Employment for Youth with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: High School Transition the Project SEARCH Way." And I actually am a nurse. I had no experience in working with people with disabilities. I was the manager of the emergency department at Cincinnati Children's Medical Center.
And about 16 years ago, I was sitting in my office, and I looked out into our lobby, and I recognized I was struck by the fact that many of the people sitting in our lobby were people with disabilities, and I started to think about it because our hospital was doing a huge diversity initiative, and I started to think about what people with disabilities could do or couldn't do or what I knew about them. And I did a little bit of exploration within the hospital, talked to our CFO, and asked him how many people with disabilities were treated at our hospital each year. What part -- what portion of our revenue came from providing services? And it turns out it was really high.
I also looked at our clinics. We have about 56 clinics, and it turns out that two-thirds of them are even named after a disability. We have Down syndrome clinic, autism clinic, epilepsy clinic, cerebral palsy clinic. I could go on and on.
What we hadn't done at Children's Hospital was provide opportunities for the patients that were coming to us throughout their lives who happened to have disabilities. We hadn't provided them with opportunities to train in positions or come to a training program at the hospital, and we had never proactively hired a person with a disability.
When we looked into it, we pretty much had been doing one thing. We'd been allowing them to volunteer, and that was all. And so I decided that I would reach out into the community and talk to people who were disability experts and see how we could create a program that allowed us to train people with disabilities to do the jobs that we had available in our hospital and how we could also use the hospital to train people with disabilities to do jobs out in the community.
And so I reached out to Susie Rodkowski and Jennifer Lineberry from education, from voc rehab, and from developmental disability. And we sat down and came up with a model which made sense to me, a businesswoman. And that's how we started Project SEARCH.
So today, I'm going to talk to you about what Project SEARCH is and what we do. So essentially in a nutshell, Project SEARCH is a 1-year, school-to-work program for young people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I'll be talking about this further. This is just to kind of give you the overview before I start my presentation so you know where we're going.
The goal of Project SEARCH is always one thing above all others, and that is competitive employment. We take young people, and we put them into a business, and it is total workplace immersion. That is a cornerstone of what Project SEARCH is. There are many good transition programs out there that will go into a workplace for several hours a day and teach folks skills. We take that one step further. We build on that experience. And we put our young people into a business for 100 percent of their final year of high school eligibility.
What they're going to do, they're going to rotate through three internships over the course of that year, and they're going to focus on career expiration and job skill acquisition so they're going to learn marketable skills that they can take out into the world. And then finally, Project SEARCH culminates with customized job search assistance and follow along that's provided as long as those folks are employed. So that's in a nutshell the Project SEARCH model.
What's our philosophy? Stephen Simon said this a long time ago. He said people with disabilities have the right to choose a path toward education and employment. However, while freedom of choice is given, the right to work is earned, and earning the right to work is dependent upon the student's preparation.
At Project SEARCH, we feel very strongly that people with disabilities are just like everybody else. They -- if they want to work, they still must earn the right to work. And that means they have to gain the preparation necessary to do a given job. The problem in America is that there aren't many opportunities that teach them or give them the preparation they need to do the work. So Project SEARCH is a program where young people earn the right to work by gaining preparation.
In terms of a focus on employment, Siegel in 1993 said, "Those who have failed to achieve a gainful career are also missing out on the richness of having an economic life, the self-respect that comes from earning a decent wage, and the sense of community and personal growth that comes from being part of a work culture."I'm always struck by this because I think for too many people with disabilities, they are denied the self-respect that comes from earning a decent wage and the sense of community and personal growth.
I was talking to someone yesterday, and he was telling me that he reads obituaries kind of as a hobby. But his point, I think, and we were talking about this presentation. His point was that when you read someone's obituary, you know, in this paragraph that summarizes their life, it says basically two things about the person. It says who loved them and what they did. And so much of our life is about what we do, and yet, without preparation, without training, people with disabilities are often denied that ability to say this is what I do, to tell the story of their life.
So Project SEARCH, I mentioned this briefly. We, essentially, when we started, said, you know, we don't need to reinvent the wheel. There's good things going on. How do we take the best practices that are out there? How do we take what's been learned, bring it together differently, really, in a business-led model and -- but still work with the same people who are experts? And so Project SEARCH, no matter where we have a program, it doesn't matter. We always work with largely the five same partners. So we always -- our program always takes place within a business. And if you go to the right, we are always working with DRS, with the Division of Rehab Services, or voc rehab, because they have a role in the lives of people with disabilities and employment so it's natural for us to work with them.
We always work with a supported employment agency, and that group works with us by providing job coaches. We always work with long-term support agencies or DD agencies because many people with disabilities who get jobs, just because you're employed, you don't lose your disability. And getting a job is just half the hurdle. Keeping that job is the other so Project SEARCH always incorporates long-term support.
And then lastly, there's the school or education. We -- all Project SEARCH programs have an educational partner, and they work with us on the educational components of transition. And my slide is missing one word, and that is there should be the word "intern"right in the middle. They really are the sixth and key partner of this whole proposal.
So I want to talk a little bit about funding. I think it's important to, again, to show you how our model works because this is often misunderstood. And so if you look at the top of my slide, it says, "Serial Funding,"and it starts with education and then says, voc rehab and then says, developmental disability. And I use VR and DD because they tend to be the more generic terms nationwide. But typically, if you're a person with a disability, you have certain entitlements throughout your life. You have to qualify for those entitlements, but in general, there are a series of entitlements that are pretty common across the United States. And the first is education. If you meet certain requirements, you are entitled to take part in special education, and you will have an IEP or a 504 plan. And as you work through education, there are goals there. The schools are going to be graded on how well they do.
When it gets to the final four years of education, that's considered a transition period in education. It's typically an 18 to 21-year-old period, and the focus is transition. I mean, that's the entire focus of that 4-year period. It's transitioning you to adulthood with everything else that that means: employment, independence, many things, social activities out in the community. So those -- so education is tasked with transitioning young people to adulthood including employment. And there's a certain amount of money that goes with that. Schools are given funding to work on transition. Plus, they're even graded on that. And in the United States, there are indicators 13 and 14 which grade schools on how well they're doing on getting folks employed in the community who have disabilities. So education has that goal if you look at that slide.
Now, if a young person with a disability leaves school and they don't get a job, then they go to voc rehab. And voc rehab is tasked with essentially the same thing that education was in those final years: getting a person a job or helping them to get a job. And so you have two groups that are being paid to do essentially the same thing. Only they do it differently, and they don't necessarily work together.
And then if a person with a disability gets a job, they go on to -- or doesn't get a job, they can go on to a developmental disability services, and that group is responsible for keeping them in a job, or if they've been unsuccessful with getting a job with either education or VR, the young person might be placed in an enclave or a workshop. So, again, a piece of employment. So you have these three key groups in every community in the United States that have some emphasis and some funding that is meant to help with employment of people with disabilities. And yet, as a rule, these groups don't work together on any given employment trajectory at the same time.
And so what we did, we basically said, from a business point of view, can we combine resources? Can we combine gifts, talents, knowledge from all three of these partners into one year and call that program Project SEARCH and insert it into a business? So that's really what Project SEARCH is. It's the final year of someone's education. VR is going to step in and be a much more active partner. They may even -- they will fund part of the year, and DD is going to step in and be there in terms of the job search and then follow along, job follow along. So that's Project SEARCH is that final year of high school eligibility, but we have all three partners.
And I think one thing about Project SEARCH, and I've added this recently to my presentation because collaboration is hard. And people say to me every day, you know, what's -- what are the hardest parts of Project SEARCH. And I think -- I don't even have to think about it, really. It's collaboration. I'm going to just go back. It's saying to education, VR, and developmental disabilities, yes, you have your policies. Yes, you have your funding streams and your billing systems, and yes, you have your mission, and yes, they're different, but you still are really supposed to be serving the same group of people. And so let's work together. But taking those three groups and working together is really, really hard and then inserting them into a business.
And here's just one example of how this plays out. And I think what I should say is that what Project SEARCH does sometimes, and we hear this from around the country, because we bring these groups together and make them work on one project, it's a really good way to look at overall systems change. And I know in the state of New York, Project SEARCH was written into their federal systems change grant because our program requires these partners to come together and talk about who they are, what they bring to the table, and how we can work most effectively. But so anyway, it's interesting. Project SEARCH has one goal: employment. And I think, if you look at this slide, during that transition period, education would tell you they care about employment. Voc rehab would tell you they're there for employment. Developmental disability would tell you they care about employment. And yet, when you ask them to define employment, you get three vastly different definitions. And so here's the example.
During that 4-year transition period in education, and you're talking about transition and the indicators. In education, employment can count as being a homemaker, joining the military, going on to some further education, or taking some classes, going into a workshop, going into an enclave, or last but not least, going on to competitive employment. And in education, under indicator 14, if any one of those things are done for a person with a disability, they, the school, can count that as 100 percent passage of indicator 14. So you could have an entire class of young people with significant disabilities who leave education without employment. And yet, the school, because of these very definitions, can get a 100 percent passing grade.
And now so what happens is we have schools that are doing really well in their indicator and not very many people with disabilities nationwide who are actually leaving school and going into employment. It's less than ten percent. And so then those young people go to voc rehab. Well, voc rehab has only one definition of employment, and that means competitive employment.