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KANSAN.COM
Disability program helps prepare people for careers
Angie BALDELOMAR @AngleBaldelomar
For many people with intellectual and physical disabilities, finding competitive employment is one of the biggest challenges. In 2015, 17.5 percent of people with disabilities were employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to 65 percent of people without a disability.
Of that number, many people have menial jobs meaning they are paid well below a living wage and work only a few hours a week.
The Family Employment Awareness Training (FEAT) was launched at the University in 2010 to help individuals with disabilities and their families gain meaningful employment after school. The program recently published a report that says the training workshops it offers have
been successful in increasing people with disabilities' jobs expectations.
Judith Gross, assistant research professor at the Beach Center of Disability and director of FEAT, said the program has been successful in making people and their families confident that they can get a meaningful and competitive employment.
"We have data that shows that we're increasing people's expectations and increasing their knowledge of resources, and overall participants feel that it has made a difference in their ability to address barriers that they encounter and how they use resources or how they seek out solutions to the problems they're encountering," she said.
The workshops help people with disabilities and their families understand the resources available. Gross said the complex array of services, such as state and federal funding and employment resources, and how these are used can be hard to understand not only for parents, but for educators and providers as well.
Families Together, a training and information center for parents of individuals with disabilities, is in charge of implementing the FEAT workshops across the state.
Tami Allen, Families Together program director in Garden City, said they bring in people working in the community to talk about their experiences and show how participants can achieve that. Part of the program includes follow-up calls.
"A lot of times, families get discouraged because of challenges they might encounter after leaving," she said. "So, one of the challenges for us is to provide a continued support for families once training is done."
Debra Patterson, a parent who participated in one of the workshops in Garden City, said even though the information provided in the workshop is good, sometimes it is not viable in rural areas in the state.
For Patterson, there are other factors that stop people with disabilities from getting a meaningful job in small towns in Kansas, such as limited public transportation, lack of staff and independent living centers.
"My problem is that when you come into the real world, when you try to work with outside agencies to make everything come together, it's not happening in southwest Kansas," she said.
Still, Gross said she thinks workshops have been successful in increasing not only people with disabilities' expectations but also their families' for
finding a competitive job.
"Part of the thing that makes it more successful, I think, than other types of programs is that we focus on families, the individual with disability and their support network," she said.
In bigger cities, such as Lawrence, different programs work to aid students' transition into employment. At the University, for example, the KU-Transition to Postsecondary Employment (KU-TPE) program has successfully completed its first year. This program aims to support students with intellectual disabilities, age 18 to 25, work toward a two-year certificate.
"They take a minimum of six credit hours each semester, as well as being involved in work experience both paid and unpaid, on and off campus, as well making social connections," Megan Heidrich, the KUTPE program coordinator,
said.
Heidrich said that starting this fall, students will be able to live on campus in one of the residence halls.
"It's great that we have the residential component now," she said. "It allows us to expand, and it allows students to make a lot of social connections and be a part of campus life."
The program was piloted with three students and, in the fall, the number of students will increase to 12. As the name states, the program focuses on helping students transition from school to obtaining competitive employment.
"Not only are we looking for employment upon graduation, but it would be competitive employment, meaning students that graduate are paid minimum wage or higher working for 20 hours a week or higher," she said.