Marvelous Monday

Its Monday!  You know what that means?  Well for me its the last Monday of my two week summer vacation.  No rest for the wicked (awesome) assistant principal here! I am not a very good rester and have been spending the day trying to create a school based work program for students with intellectual disabilities.  You never miss the big city so much as when you are trying to find employers who are willing to allow students with disabilities to learn work skills in real life settings. Seriously, I use to take for granted taking kids to a restaurant to fold napkins.  Not anymore!

Actually this has been a project the special education teacher and I have been working on since April.  The wait list for the disabilities work center is months to years for most of our students, which means that if a student with an intellectual disability graduates, they won't go to work 6 months to a year after they left us.  This is way to long for a student to transition when when they graduate or age out of the services that the school provides.  The students deserve better!  

When your school is located in a rural, agricultural area, finding businesses that will let you train students is difficult.  Business which traditionally allow students with disabilities to come in and stock shelves, fold napkins, sort and clean hire people in the small town to do those things and those people need those jobs no matter how little they pay.  Many of my students don't have the physical stamina or dexterity to spend hours picking crops and again the families that still farm don't often hire workers to do jobs that machines can do.

Trying to find research of other schools who have created such programs has also proved difficult.  I've tried google, ARC, the closest town to the school disability resource center, and Vocational Rehab.  As more and more colleges are creating programs for students with disabilities to have a collegiate experience, it seems as though the rural areas of this country and work skills have been left behind.  The most honest answer I have received in my research was from the state Vocational Rehab specialists (who are supposed to help with such transitions) and that was if I want a work program in my school for students with intellectual disabilities, then I better plan on creating it.

So, here we are!  The second year assistant principal trolling the internet for suggestions of jobs that students with IQ's between 30-60 could do in our school.  I have already scheduled in office work, mail delivery, uniform washing service and working in the school gardens.  My special education teacher would like to run a store, or a business selling plants to the community.  Both ventures would interfere with our vocational classes for non disabled peers.  My bright idea is to have the students with intellectual disabilities and the non disabled students in the vocational classes work together.  This is taking more of a sell to the regular education vocational teachers and the special education teachers than I originally thought it would.  I've developed a train the trainee mode for higher functioning intellectual students, non disabled students and the more intellectually disabled students.  I'm open to suggestions!  I can't be the only school with such a problem so I'm sharing and will keep you posted on how the program goes in case it can help someone else!

On The Road

I'm starting the journey of educational blogging.  Yeah! Happy times!  Actually, I need to get one of my students to assist me with getting one of the pages I just created to show.  This should be easy, creating a blog.  I have a Master's and a PhD.  I'm a highly educated person and use technology on a daily basis, but getting my All About Me page to show... no dice!

I'm a big proponent of I teach you, you teach me.  There is always something to be learned.  Currently I'm learning to walk correctly so I can go back to running.  I'm learning about implementing Tier 2 PBIS at the high school level, and I'm learning how to do an educational blog.  I hope people want to read it (at least someone other than my husband who does not work at a school).  I'm not like some teachers who have to have complete control over the learning environment.  I encourage teachers to ask students what they want to learn and what the student has to offer to teach.  I think that a lot of educators forget that kids can be the best teachers.  If in doubt, ask one to help you with that new technology the system is implementing!

Now, where did I put my National History Day website student's phone number?  She'd have this blog looking professional in less than five minutes and wonder why I've been struggling to get a page to show for two days now!