Business Communities Make a Difference in the Lives of High School Students with Disabilities

The LADSE Vocational Program is the longest operating State funded program devoted to high school, special education, vocational training. Our sole purpose is to assist area high schools in providing quality, well-managed, opportunities for work-place training that will lead to successful outcomes for students post-graduation. We have been incredibly successful over our 67 years of existence. Our success is very much tied into our ability to partner with our local business community.

High schools are limited in the types of real-life experiences they can offer. Our area high school programs do a masterful job of using school resources to provide in-school jobs, mock-interviews, or social-communication classes, to assist their students in learning the soft-skills so valuable to a successful transition to adult-life. But there is no comparison to the type of real-life, moment-to-moment learning that happens when our students are in the community, using public transportation, working directly with a real-life co-worker, or communicating directly with a business supervisor.  In high school vocational training, our job is to mimic adult life to the fullest extent possible, so that students gain skills that ensure a seamless transition into a successful post high school life. This type of immersion training is called Community Based Learning.

Community Based Learning takes on many forms, and this is the genius of the CBL model. A local business may only have the opportunity for a student to be on site for 1 hour per week, while another business may have enough space for a student to be on site for 2 days per week, 1 hour each visit.  Conversely, perhaps a local business or organization can only accommodate a single “job-shadow”, where a student visits a company once and has an information gathering conversation with an employee or owner. It all works! Our goal is to expose students to adult workplace thinking and communication; any opportunity can be framed and built into a genuine educational learning experience. Each of these experiences, be it a 40-minute job shadow or a multi-hour per week job training site, is fully coached, meaning LADSE and our local school districts combine to provide at least one job coach for the duration of the visit. We aim for our community based experiences to have the least impact on our business partners while providing meaningful learning that resonates with our high school students.

There are three primary concerns that we hear from our community partners when discussing bringing high school students into their worksites:
1. Insurance: who covers insurance for our students? All LADSE students are covered by LADSE district insurance, wherever their learning takes place, including on community business job sites.

2. Time/resources needed to train our students: LADSE and District job coaches take your instructions and modify them, repeat them as needed, and use them to help the student learn the job task and deliver consistent, quality results. It is not incumbent upon the workplace to do this work. Give us the basics and we will take it from there!
3. What can the students do, what should WE do: This is a question about the unknown.  How do students communicate? How do I communicate with them?  Here at LADSE, we have an entire team of Employment Specialists whose sole job is to answer these questions prior to any experience starting. We aim for no surprises. Our community specialists will have a meeting with you and your staff prior to any student visiting to determine the How, the Why and the When for any vocational experience. 

Again, we have been doing this for almost 70 years.  No surprises and a win-win for students and community business partners is our primary goal.

In closing, if your agency or business is looking for an opportunity to be engaged in their community and to deliver a truly life-changing, valuable service to the local disabled community, look no further than the LADSE Vocational Team.  And once that student has completed all training, has graduated high school and has started an adult life of their own as a paying consumer, the pay-back is immense; the lessons learned in your business, through your donation of time and space, will last a lifetime.

For more information about how to partner with the LADSE Vocational Department,