Preparing for College: Programs for Youth with Vision Impairment or Intellectual Disabilities
April 11, 2012
ROUGH EDITED COPY
REMOTE CART PROVIDED BY:
ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION SERVICES, LLC
PO BOX 278
LOMBARD, IL 60148
This is being provided in a roughdraft format. Remote Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
NORCIVA SHUMPERT: I'd like to welcome everybody. I'd like to welcome everybody to the webinar today. And we appreciate each of you being here today. We've got about 100 people that will be joining us. I know that folks typically sign in. I'm Norciva Shumpert. We have a series of webinars set Southeast TACE puts out, and this is one of the transition webinars.
We are a it is our center's mission really to improve the quality and effectiveness of vocational rehabilitation services.
And also to really focus on employment outcomes for individuals in our eight states. What I would like to do is call on a couple of states and see who we've got here so everybody knows the different states that we work with.
Go ahead and put a green check if you are from the state of Florida. Just raise your hand or a green check. So we've got some folks from Florida on this line. I'm glad to have you on with us today.
One of your speakers will also be from has been in Florida and worked in Florida also.
Let me go ahead and clear those checks and let's see who's on from Mississippi today.
How about North Carolina? South Carolina? Got a couple from South Carolina. Thank you for raising your hand on that one.
And what about our states from Tennessee? And Kentucky. Anybody on from those places?
Well, those are basically the states that we serve. Our Southeast TACE takes into consideration Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and South Carolina. We usually get a printout and we typically have a representation of most states.
We are hosting another webinar in June and July, August, and September that are transitions focused. I would encourage all of you if you're not signed up in our webinar system to please go ahead and sign up so that you have access to those.
All of our webinars are run on Elluminate Live, and Celestia is our webinar expert has always made it available for accessibility to everyone. Most of our accessibility issues have to do with some of the pretesting, so I'm hoping all of you were able to go ahead and pretest today and make sure. We're not able to provide assistance during the today's call, however, if you can close all your other applications if you're having some problems, sometimes that will resolve those things.
Today I'm real excited, I've been talking to these gentlemen for about two months now looking at this presentation. And for many of you it was a little bit confusing, some said, well, who is our focus here? And we have a couple of experts on that as Celestia has said is from the American Foundation for the Blind. And that's Scott Truax and Joe Strechay.
And both of these are providing information here I could not miss the opportunity to talk about people with intellectual disabilities also having an opportunity to go to college.
So we've got the majority of our presentation Scott and Joe will be leading. And we'll talk just briefly to keep the door holder or placeholder, if you would, on recognizing that people with intellectual disabilities can also go to college.
So let me just introduce Scott and Joe. Scott Truax, both of them are at the foundation headquarters I think located in West Virginia. And Scott has worked an awful lot at the American Foundation for the Blind since 2005. He has been very active in developing tools and resources for students, and I'm excited today that he will be introducing and sharing a tool that you guys can go back to, perhaps take some of your job seekers to that website also to empower them with knowledge on how to do things in that direction.
He's been very active in other organizational type teams that would reach over into helping a different focus, the FamilyConnect.org is also something that Scott has been involved with.
Joe is one of our native southeastern folks who's worked here in the state of Florida at rehab for the blind, he's been to Florida State University, and he's also traveled and done other parts. Joe is also the representative to the world blind unions employment work group. Wow, Joe, that's a mouthful. And he is the representative to North American and Caribbean representative to that group.
So without any further ado, let me go ahead and introduce, hand the mic over to Joe. And if you've got questions I would like to encourage you to go ahead and write questions in the chat room. One of the things that I will be doing is going to the chat room and looking at what your questions are and when there is time to ask knows questions I'll ask Joe and Scott to take a break and let me ask some of those questions of them.
So please, as you're going through this, write your question down, they may answer it later in their presentation, but at least we've got the opportunity to hear what some of your concerns are.
Joe, I'm going to turn it over to you first. Is that correct?
JOE STRECHAY: That's correct. Thank you. Welcome. I'm Joe Strechay, I worked in Florida in the division of blind services over in their state office overseeing transition programs. And now Wayne Jennings oversees CR and transition in the state. And Scott is also from Florida, he will tell you a little bit that, but he's from Miami and he's also an FSU guy. So we're a couple of southeasterners.
But we're out of the American foundation for the blind, an organization that Helen Keller worked for for like 41 years. Our headquarters is in NewYork City and we have offices in NewYork, Washington, D.C., Huntington, West Virginia, where I'm located, Atlanta, Georgia, Dallas, Texas, and then a few people that are working remote, Scott's out of San Antonio, Texas.
I will let Scott say a little here.
SCOTT TRUAX: Thank you, Joe. Yes, I get the pleasure of working out of San Antonio but I did graduate high school from Miami and orientation mobility was my background when I graduated from Florida state.
So it's a pleasure to be with you all today. I spent the majority of my career in Washington state working with families with children who are blind out of the vocational rehabilitation agency, and we set up some college programs, work programs, those kinds of things. So I'll be supplementing and sharing what Joe provides with stories from those experiences. Joe, why don't you go ahead, and Joe, I went to the first slide already.
JOE STRECHAY: Okay. So welcome to the VI or visually impaired student college survival guide. We already did our little introduction. So on slide two it says what is the ultimate goal of a student going off to college?
And I say success, or to succeed. But what does that actually mean? We're going to be today we're going to be moving on the slide three, and for all of the persons following along using a screen reader.
On slide three we're going to be breaking it down into the areas that are while working in the state of Florida I was doing my graduate work at Florida State University. We had a University experience program there, and I helped create a curriculum there that was utilizing the program while I was there, it was a college preparation course, and these are areas that I specifically noticed that students were arriving or ill prepared for and gaps, you could say. And also from my experience as a visually impaired person who went to college and graduate school.
On slide three we have what are the areas any college student needs to succeed in? We have attendance, which I define as orientation and mobility, which is more than that, truly, but specifically for persons with visual impairment, readings, testing, notetaking, studying, time management, volunteer experience, social skills, self advocacy, accessing technology, resources, independent living skills, employment skills, and there truly are many others. But these are just some of the areas that we choose to focus on.
After we go through this college preparation part we're going to move on to a small section onsetting career goals and then going on to show you some specific resources and activities that you can utilize with your clients and students and also relay to others.
We're moving on to slide four.
The importance. The importance basically these areas are evident I talk about the importance because students with visual impairment specifically who are blind learn do not learn incidentally. They don't visually see persons completing tasks and learning in this manner. They have to be specifically taught activities or and taught how to do it. Often the student with visual impairments or blindness may be able to talk a lot about a subject matter but they may not have the real skill behind it, behind completing that task. If that makes sense.
And if you guys have questions all along, please relay them and Norciva will relay them as well to us.
SCOTT TRUAX: We all know going to college is a time where you start to explore your interests, you're out away from your family in many cases, although some people choose to continue to live at home, but those that go on to a dorm life, they're expanding, testing winning and finding out things.
One of the problems we discovered when we were running our college programs is that students had been really taught fairly well how to be a good student, how to being in class and do things, the next level created had higher expectations, higher workload, note taking, some of those things were different and we're going to talk about those. But one of the things I want to point early on was the students really had problems learning how to rec create on campus and how to be as Joe said in the first slide, what is success. And part of it is to succeed within the college environment and get the entire experience.
And one of my concerns is sometimes the students end up with a fairly strong academic program but aren't really getting to experience the full college environment. Joe?
JOE STRECHAY: And that's quite important because employers aren't looking for just people that are succeeding academically, they want people involved in their community, they want people that have experience, that can relate to other people.
If you can just relate to a textbook or a I don't know, you can write a paper, they're looking for people who can interact, who can actually solve problems and part of going to college is solving problems. And we'll talk a little bit about that.
As we move on to slide five, which is titled attendance, and O & M, or orientation and mobility. A student has to learn the campus, what does it take to learn the campus? Students need to arrive on campus early. It all depends on a student's orientation and mobility skills. This relates to employment as well. Showing up the first day to a job and not having not having a basic idea of the setup of the office or where they're going to be or how to get to the office is going to be an issue as well.
But on campus, campuses range in sizes, if you look at community colleges or postsecondary like vocational training there may be a couple buildings. You get to universities where there is many, many buildings, I know personally when I arrived to Florida state I moved from NewJersey and I was able to get to campus about a week and a half early so that I could learn routes and I enlisted all kinds of people. I paid someone to work with me. I was moving to the state of Florida from NewJersey. I paid someone an hourly rate. I also worked with taxi drivers and with people on campus. I paid for someone to come down to Florida for to with me to help me move in for the first two days and work on routes around campus, utilizing the maps and talking to people at the student disability resource center and going off basic routes and expanding those routes. If you know Florida State University has like 41,000 students. My undergraduate I did at a school which was 20,000 students, east Carolina University. And so the routes are different.
But, you know, you have to learn the routes to those most important places. You have to eat, right? When you get to campus. Learning where the cafeteria is. If you're not going to be eating in the cafeteria, learning how you're going to get to the grocery store or transportation to get to the grocery store.
So routes. A numbering systems on campus. Not all buildings are labeled in the same manner. So you have to learn the numbering systems they use.
How the room are set up in the classroom. I guess I'm on slide six now for attendance.
SCOTT TRUAX: Joe, let me jump in and add a little bit. I think for m students who are blind they've learned orientation mobility which teaches you to keep track of going block by block so you know you go three blocks, you've gone curb to curb three times, you've gone the distance. As Joe mentioned, most universities are not set up that way. When I was in graduate school in University of Texas as a mobility instructor I supplemented my spending money by orienting students to that very large campus, and the use of different landmarks was really critical.
So I think that you may have a good student who had extensive O & M, but they may find training is what I mean, orientation mobility training, but we may find when we go to campus they need to develop new skills, certainly people within the University may be accustomed to it, you know, know the types of things.
There was one University that had a fountain, and I checked to make sure that it was on 24 hours a day because it was a landmark to be able to find where the cafeteria was for the meals.