Empowering Choices and Empowering Transitions Projects - Chicago, Illinois

Community Setting

The Empowering Choices and Empowering Transitions Projects take place in four high schools within the Chicago Public Schools, as well as in the Chicago community.

Population Served

The Empowering Choices and Empowering Transitions Projects serve high school students with disabilities, including learning disabilities, cognitive disabilities, serious emotional disturbance, orthopedic impairment, and other health impairments. Ninety percent of the students qualify for free or reduced price lunch. Half of the participating students are African-American and the other half are Hispanic/Latino. Almost one-fourth of the students have Limited English Proficiency. A number of students come from families that struggle with violence, substance abuse, and poverty.

Program Description

The purpose of the Empowering Choices Project is to prepare youth (grades 11-12) with disabilities for competitive employment after graduating from high school. The goal of the Empowering Transitions Project is to develop students' (grades 9-10) competencies to assume a proactive role in their education and vocational development. Both Projects emphasize goal setting and attainment, empowerment, and self-advocacy. The Projects also help students learn to recruit mentors who can help them achieve their personal goals. Both projects include a classroom-based curriculum and case management services. Empowering Choices emphasizes parent support and education, while Empowering Transitions emphasizes vocational guidance and exploration.

Exemplary Self-Determination Practices

Classroom-based curriculum

A case manager assigned to each school conducts (biweekly?) sessions with participating students at the school. Lessons are taken from A road-map for success: Setting goals and recruiting mentors (Balcazar, Garate-Serafini, & Keys, 1999) and include group discussion, role play, and other activities to teach self-awareness, self-advocacy, goal setting and attainment, and job seeking and maintenance skills. Some of the activities allow for peer modeling as well as modeling by the case manager.

Intensive case management

Each student in the project works intensively with one of the case managers on personal goals and vocational exploration. The case manager may engage in a wide range of activities, such as arranging for tutoring or mentoring, providing transportation to job interviews, or talking with the families about students' progress in school or in seeking a job. The case manager also often assumes the role of a job developer and an informal counselor, attending IEP meetings with the student. Case managers often use creative methods to help students understand the range of options available to them. For example, a student who had never left the neighborhood near his school went on an errand with a case manager to downtown Chicago. The case manager spent some time pointing out long-term career options available downtown. The case manager's role may begin as one in which he or she "does for" the student, but as the student develops capacities to set goals, attain goals, and self-advocate, the case manager assumes a less active and more supportive role.

Parent education

Many parents of the students who participate in the project do not have a thorough understanding of IEPs or postsecondary educational and vocational options. Project staff holds informational sessions to train parents on vocational rehabilitation and related topics. Case managers also provide ongoing information to parents through home visits.

Collaboration

The Empowerment projects collaborate with the Illinois Department of Vocational Rehabilitation Services, local business, and technical training and community college programs. (Tere - this was from your web site, but in person you said that collaboration was a struggle. I'm not sure what to say here so it is accurate.)

What Makes it Work?

• As a program based outside the school system, the Empowerment Projects are not as bound by district or building regulations; they have the flexibility to serve students creatively. The project is especially successful in schools in which the building administration is supportive of the project.
• Case managers emphasize trust building, confidentiality, and acceptance. These relationship factors enhance the case managers' status with the students and their families, who can be slow to trust outsiders.
• The Empowerment Projects operate in such a way that the goal setting and self-advocacy skills are applied directly to jobs and postsecondary education. Generalization of self-determination skills is built into the Projects.
• Case managers model advocacy behaviors for students and provide coaching to help the students learn to self-advocate. While case managers make suggestions and "pave the way" for self-advocacy, the decision to self-advocate or act to attain goals is the student's.
• The approaches used by the Project staff are culturally competent in that they are consistent with the backgrounds of the families in the Project. For example, the case managers use high context communication and a strong humanistic approach rather than a task-oriented approach.

Staff

The Empowerment Projects are supported by Federal funding awarded to the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Department of Disability and Human Development. Three full-time case managers work directly with participating students and their families in the school and community. Undergraduate and graduate students at UIC work with the case managers and provide tutoring and mentoring to program participants. A project director and office staff at UIC support the case managers.

What People Say About Self-Determination and the Empowerment Projects

With our program, [students are] not only able to look for a job, access information that you need for a job, pick up the phone, and sell themselves, and access information that you need. You're able to dress for the job, answer questions, ask questions, get a job, and retain a job. The difference is, once I'm gone, [students are] able to replicate those skills over and over again.- Case manager

[The case manager] will give you lots of ideas, but he won't say you have to do it. He plants little thoughts in your head. - Student

My daughter is going to be able to go very far now that she can go as far as she wants. Now that there is a goal in front of her, she can do it. - Parent

I have a lot of decisions.the ones I am real interested in really doing.about two or three decisions like going into the Army, or just keep working, or just keep going to school. But I like to achieve more higher learning like that so I can work myself into better careers and better things. - Student

[Students in the project] definitely talk about what they want to do after school.Some kids say things like, "I want to be a pilot for the airlines," but they know they have to go into the service, that they are going to go into the Air Force or something through the GI Bill to get to that point. They are not just, "I want to be a fireman." They are kids that want to be firemen or policemen and they know what it takes. - High School Teacher

For more information about the Empowering Choices and Empowering Transition Programs, please contact:

Teresa Garate-Serafini
Department of Disability and Human Development
University of Illinois at Chicago
M/C 626
1640 W. Roosevelt Rd
Chicago IL 60608
Phone: 312.413.5393
Fax: 312.996.4744
Email: tere@uic.edu
http://www.uic.edu/depts/idhd/empower/