Transition and employment - notes from a Minnesota presentation

The special needs roller coaster starts to speed up again in 10th grade.Tenth grade is when #1 is no longer encouraged to join mainstream sports teams, perhaps because the coaches are no longer educators. They are competitors. Tenth grade is when the gulf between him and mainstream students he admires becomes too big for him to ignore, and there's sorrow in his heart he does not understand and cannot express. It's when the focus changes from an educational track to an employment track.Employment was the focus of a meeting I attended today. I won't try to summarize what I heard, instead I'll summarize what I think is happening in Minnesota and probably nationally. My summary has only a passing resemblance to anything I heard today, it's my own personal impression for which nobody bears responsibility.To keep this short, so I can get to sleep, I'll do this in a series of bullet points.How things used to work in the 70s-00s.After deinstitutionalization in the 1970s money was made available for community care of disabled persons in the form of waivers:DD: Developmental disordersCADI: Mental health (schizophrenia mostly)CAC: Severe medical (vent dependency now, once might have been more)BI: Traumatic brain injur (this may be more recent)The waivers were used to pay for various forms of what was once called Supported Employment for developmentally disabled adults whose primary income came from Social Security Disability.  Supported employment and related activities included:DTNH ...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Tags: transition support employment education Twin Cities adult Source Type: blogs