Corning.mp3
Welcome to the TransQual online monthly podcast, “In Their Own Words.”
Each month CornellUniversity’s Employment and Disability Institute profiles people dedicated to a process of collaboration and innovation, advancing student post school outcomes in living, learning and earning.
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And now, this month’s profile
“I am Bill Losinger. I work for Corning Painted Post school district. I’m a transition teacher. We’re running a community work experience program. We attempt to find placements for students who are in need of some experience in the community working –whether it be a paid or unpaid experience. There are two high schools in our district and we do the community work experience at both high schools. Both high schools understand the importance of our program and they are well aware of what we do and how many students we are working with. Over the course of the school year we probably are working anywhere from, -probably close to 30 students who have been in some type of work experience.”
“Well we’re hoping that students as they leave school, they’ll be prepared to enter into some type of a job. I’m pretty pleased with the number of students that we have out for part of the day that are actually doing work and it seems as though we are able to have students at a younger age sometimes get a couple years of experience in before they graduate. We’ve seen some changes there. We’ve seen some changes with some students who traditionally have not entered into employment or even been considered for community work experience because of the severity of their disability. We’re finding that some of these students are doing ok- doing quite well in community placements.”
“Our work experience program is basedon individual needs and individual interests and there is no prerequisite. We get referrals, we talk to the student and we try to find what’s best for them. We’re closely connected with a lot of the adult agencies in our area: AIMIndependentLivingCenter,SteubenARC, Pathways, some of the other adult agencies we work very closely with so that our students will be prepared as they transition out of high school. These agencies will already know our students and it just makes the process a lot smoother.”
“One of our better success stories I think involved a student who was classified as moderately and mentally retarded. His first two years of high school, because of some challenging behaviors, he was assigned to a one to one aide and pretty much it was expected that he probably would end up in some type of adult day treatment center or sheltered employment. But then in his junior year we thought that maybe if we changed the focus of his program a little bit and made it a little more vocational that things might improve for him. And we started giving him some jobs in the school, and in a short period of time he no longer needed that one on one aid, his behaviors improved, he started developing relationships with people in the school. And then his senior year he was referred to VESID. We found a couple of different community work experiences for him and he was very successful, and through the help of AIM and also SteubenPlacement and VESID and he was employed – he is employed at a local restaurant. That job was in place before he graduated so it was a good feeling to know that he would leave school and go right on to work. So he is employed by a restaurant and he also does some part time work at the administration building for the school district and he is treated as a regular employee and basically the only supports he need are the natural supports of the businesses.”
“So that particular student went from needing a one on one aid in a school system to pretty much being independent on the job. For some of our students who are VESID clients – VESID does have monies to help pay adult agencies to do job development and job coaching. For some of our younger students we’ve been fortunate for the last year, year and a half- to be involved with a grant.And there is some money in there we can use to hire job coaches and to hire – to get some services from agencies. So in the past we’ve used smaller grants also to help secure some of these services. One of the things we’d like to see increase is the amount of job developers that we have available to find placements for students. We at the schools do a lot of that, but its also – we have used the adult agencies to do it and it just doesn’t seem to have as many of those job developers available as we would like and I think that would improve our program a lot if we had more of those.”
“One of the things that I’m most proud of is over the last few years we’ve gotten away from having traditionally difficult students have to jump through hoops in order to be included in some of our community activities, some of our community experiences. We don’t necessarily do that now. Even though a student may be having a lot of difficulty in school, we’re kinda taking a chance on them- that they will succeed if we get them the right experience in the community. And what we’re finding is not only are their behaviors and their productivity good at the work experience site, -theirbehavior at school seems to improve. So instead of waiting for them to meet certain criteria before we find them a community experience, we’re just doing it and what we’re finding is most of these students are pretty successful. And again their success at school seems to improve when they’ve had some community experiences.”
This has been a podcast of the Employment and Disability Institute located in the ILR School of Cornell University. You can find us at the web at