During the last 10 months, Toronto Danial Young Rose student at 6 AM from Monday to Friday to attend a very different program from what he had known, leaving friends behind friends and family teachers while venturing into new spaces and had the challenge of developing new skills.
However, on a suffocating day at the end of June, when the 20 -year -old turned the page in high school, the smile of his face could not be cleaned.
“It has been very important to learn here, because you are moving to the real world. Now you are evolving towards this completely different person,” he said before graduating from Project Search, a program that transition to young people with intellectual or developmental disabilities to the work world.
“It has been a great experience.”
As they advance in high school, most adolescents are busy learning, training and planning their future. However, students with disabilities have much less opportunities. A programs mosaic helps transition to adulthood, but experts want more of these offers to be accessible to all who need them.
Leaving high school is “a moment of great change and great decisions, but it is also potentially a moment of crisis,” said Eddie Bartnik, an international consultant who advises the New Scotland government about disability services.
Without solid and dedicated programs for life after graduation, young people with disabilities can lose the valuable relationships and social connections they have built during their education, he says.
You can also leave families feeling drift since, after school related support, some young people languish at home.
Sometimes, “one of the parents has to give up work,” said Bartnik, an option that is “very provocative of anxiety.”
Transition programs are generally considered a responsibility for schools, according to Rachelle Hole, social work professor at Okanagan and co -director of the Canadian Institute of Inclusion and Citizenship.
However, since they are not mandatory by the Ministry of Education of each province or territory, such efforts are often “left to individual school districts or perhaps inclusive education teachers,” he said.
Limited financing means that some programs can only face so many participants and, given what she calls “a mosaic approach” in all regions, many families can face a “transition cliff” if they cannot access the aid to close the gap.
Even so, Hole praises the “pockets of excellence” throughout Canada, where different organizations, community groups and champions are successfully helping young people with disabilities to address this milestone.
‘The correct mixture of ingredients’
In September, eight new places of searching for projects in Ontario will join the 22 existing throughout the province most Pei and Manitoba.
The immersive model, followed by hundreds of branches worldwide, is designed to give participants enough time, space, clear instruction and support to build their technical and soft skills for workplaces, says Carolyn McDougugall, coordinator of Ontario-Canada of the program.
Locations generally receive participating business funds and support, school boards, disability organizations and beneficial organizations, employment agencies, private donors and foundations.
“People with significant disabilities are capable of complex and systematic work when they have the correct type of components in their training,” said McDougall, who is also a manager of Employment Route Programs at the Kids Rehabilitation Hospital of Holland Bloorview. “You just need the correct combination of ingredients.”
Young people with disabilities often do not have the opportunity for experimental learning (cooperatives, volunteer or part -time jobs, for example, that their classmates do it.
That means less direction after high school, says McDougall, but also “much less in his curriculum and … So programs like this are very essential.”
For example, Young, a fan of Jim Carrey Movies of the era of 90s, says he has learned to control jokes and be more professional at work. With practice, he also learned to make visual contact, about the importance of body language and advice to speak with new people, as well as to learn risk systems in the workplace and how to complete the paperwork.
“I learned to have confidence and really adapt … how not to hurry a task that occurred,” he said.
He has also tried works that he never met, such as a hospital goalkeeper. “I didn’t think that working in a hospital would be an environment that I could join.”
The search for the project reports an employment rate of almost 68 percent for graduates in Canada, which, McDougall points out, is more than double the national employment rate (around 27 %) for people with significant disability.
Starting early
Hole, the UBC teacher, has developed a free, online and transition planning program for school districts that will debut this fall. She says that having transition programs in the last year of secondary school is useful, but that evidence of the USA shows that starting previously obtains even better results.
It is also vital that these programs have coordinated funds from several ministries of provincial and territorial governments, says: Education, but also health, work, accessibility, social development and family services.
That is “really key for the transition process to be experienced in a fluid way.”
In September, New Scotland will begin its school graduate program, connecting 100 students with disabilities with local specialists to develop postgraduate plans. It is part of a broader reformAfter a historical legal battle between the province and the new scotlands with disabilities.
The program includes flexible and individualized funds, which could go to the hiring of support for training in the workplace, register in a special swimming class or transport for a particular community offer, says Scott Armstrong, Minister of Opportunities and Social Development of Nueva Escotia.
“We have taken the best practices we have seen in other places and put them in the program,” he said. “We really believe we are on the right path.”
Armstrong anticipates that the second cohort will double for 200 students and the program could start before. “Fifteen years is a good time to start planning,” said the former school director.
Jordan O’Neal, a project search student, returned for this year’s graduation as a speaker. The program made him reflect on the future: how to promote their interest in computers, get their own place and be more independent.
An achievement that his mother, Brendora Paul, is especially proud is that the 22 -year -old who took public transport alone when he previously traveled by school bus or with his parents.
“[Before] He was out of discussion for him to travel alone, “he said, while today he travels from home in the Eastern Suburbio of Scarborough to his retail work in the center of Toronto.” Now we are sure … You can get from point to point B. “.
