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Life After School: Transition Services help students with disabilities find success
Planning for the future can be exciting and overwhelming, especially for students with disabilities. Kalamazoo RESA’s Transition Services help families work together to identify long range goals, ensuring that students with disabilities gain the skills and community connections they need to be successful.
Three Transition Success Stories
Tylyn, a 12th-grade student from Portage Northern High School, is currently working at Full City Cafe in Portage. Ty is finding success and realizing his dream, working daily with a chef and pastry chef. He is learning to make locally grown menu items from scratch. Placement and job coaching through Transition Services helped Ty focus on developing relationships within the work place. Ty worked on interpersonal skills and can now interact well with his coworkers and customers.
Jordan, an 11th-grade student from Portage Northern, is currently working at Automotive Concepts CarStar in Portage. Jordan transitioned from more basic tasks to working with more responsibility. He has embraced the new challenges and is depended upon for several new and difficult tasks. Jordan went from not being able to complete car washing to being able to detail an entire car with minimal assistance. His coworkers have nicknamed him "Turbo" because he works so fast and is able to get his work done.
Jaylan is 12th grade student from Community High School who is currently working at PRAB in Kalamazoo. Earlier this year, Jaylan participated in Work Experience through Portage Public Schools at the Portage Police Department. He quickly outgrew his responsibilities there and was ready for a more challenging site. His goal is to be a janitor so he wanted to focus on that area to help prepare him for a full-time job. Work-based learning has made such a positive impact on Jaylan that he has become a very reliable, mature young man who has exceptional attendance. At PRAB, he is learning to use janitorial equipment and future employment with benefits is already in the talking stages.
Transition Services offer support and resources for students with disabilities and their families in areas such as housing, employment, guardianship and more. For information, visit our website.