Collaboration Between Career Services and 1 Disability Works! The DCO Model. Presenters: Alan Muir and Sarah Helm >> AARON: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the webcast on the collaboration between career services and disability services, The DCO Model. My name is Aaron McCullough and I'm a specialist with the ILRU here. And we're your sponsor for today's event. I will be moderating your webcast and it is a simple job. But my main role is to voice your questions. I want to address some technical concerns, we want you to send your questions in my E-mail by clicking at the link at the bottom of your RealOne Player or your Media Player or address your questions in an E-mail to webcast@ilru.org. That's webcast@ilru.org. Again, you can submit them directly to that interface and send them please now or at any time a question arises during a webcast. If for some reason time does not allow us to answer your concern, we will get back to you individually. Additionally, if anyone has any technical difficulties today, call us at (713)520-0232. That's (713)520-0232. If you dial that number, please dial 0 to get the operator. That number 2 is both voice and TTY capable. As previously mentioned today our topic is collaboration between career and disability services. I want to spend some time introducing our presenters today. I am grateful they are here. For the second time, at least, we bring back Alan Muir to discuss this topic. Mr. Muir co-founded the Career Opportunities for Students with Disabilities at the University of Tennessee. After coming from private sector, and I think really did help conceive of a way to bridge the gap between educating and employing students with disabilities in a way that's very /SPWAOU activator and I know you will enjoy his presentation today. He brings with him Sarah Helm, the disability office coordinator at the University of Tennessee which is the liaison opinion between the University of Tennessee's offices on Disability Services and Career Services. Her primary responsibility ask to assist those college students and alumni with various disabilities by providing that career planning and service and guidance. Again, they're going to have an opportunity to present today and I'm going to hand it over to them and await your questions. 3 Again, please send those in. Alan, Sarah... >> ALAN: Thank you, Aaron. Just wanted to get to the first slide after the title and hopefully all of you have had a chance to either -- well hopefully to print out the presentation so you will be able to follow along. I just wanted to briefly go over some of the objectives of our presentation today and basically that is to introduce the concept of the Disability-Careers Office. We call it a model but we're wanting to show you an example of how the collaboration between Disability Services and Career Services can work. We're also looking to provide information for you on the history and some of the nuts and bolts implementation to bring the DCO to fruition. Sarah will provide in her part of the presentation, what her day is like. She's going to also talk about reviewing the roles and responsibilities of what she does. Another important piece of this is the campus and community collaboration that Sarah does a great job of increasing and promoting to include community area -- area agencies and area employers to be interested in recruiting and assisting students with disabilities here at UT. We'll also highlight the future goals of the DCO and I'll come back and introduce the gateway 4 product which is rolling out this week to our employers. It is an exciting new service that COSD is providing to universities and employers for students with disabilities. We can move on now to the third slide, which is the background information. I'll talk a little bit about how this really came about and some of this is covered in a previous webcast but it still bears repeating as it is a real foundational point of why the DCO was created and also out of that COSD was created. Career opportunities for students with disabilities. Doctor Greenberg, now retired. He and I did some extensive research and in that research we saw there was no participation in services. Also here we need to identify a method of increasing the number of students who will be using career services. We knew the primary way that students are recruited here and on any campus is through career services. That's where employers come on compass to recruit campuses. They don't go to other offices very often. The reason they would go to another office is primarily they want to recruit a student with a disability. We ask that most of those students are not at career services. So we're trying to 5 make it attractive and have the connection between the two offices to make that transition easier for students with disabilities to use career services more effectively. We also worked on extensive research -- actually, there was already existing -- excuse me, let me back up. When we saw what was out there, there was so little research and transition for students with disabilities into the work force. That was a rude awakening to us that we really needed to find a way to help these students and to kind of be pioneers and able to help others to be able to do this to students. There are no statistics still on graduates on students with disabilities. Sarah will highlight the research paper that was in the most recent AHEAD journal that showed the unemployment rate in this study was between 33 and 45%. Our best estimate on what we could see was close to 40%. That's still within that range, obviously, and still seems to be a pretty solid number. Encouraging, but solid. Also we looked at how to be able to really start this program and the research we presented it to are Tennessee VR. They provided a very 6 small grant, but it was great for us to go and do our research. When we came back, as we move on to the next slide -- I'll finish the thought here. Basically when we came back and presented what we had found, then VR was able to provide us some funding to get the office actually started. Let's talk a little bit about the research itself. Our hypothesis on the next slide here, was to look at how to have the collaboration between the two offices. We realize that really was needed. Again, as I was saying -- to repeat it again -- career services is the only office where employers come to recruit and since students don't go to career services, generally, they are invisible to employers. We can't find the students with disabilities. We can't find these students we would love to have as being part of our diversity equation and to fill in more of that equation. So when we looked at all of this, we really felt that career services needs a lot of exposure. That's the reason why we're doing this as 7 a way of helping you to become more aware of the need for working with students beyond graduation or preparing them to do things beyond their graduation date. As we look at this too on the next slide, there's many research results. We found at the universities there was no model out there of having this collaboration. There were several attempts that had been made but due to funding, which of course we all deal with and we all have to contend with, some of it went away because of that. Also some people moved on to other projects. But what was surprising was we found there's really a nonawareness between these two offices of each other's existence. Those were things that were found that really needed to be addressed to help both offices to provide a more effective continuum of service for students with disabilities. Let's move on to the next slide, which was the employer piece and again, as I mentioned, that they were really looking for students with disabilities, they understood the changing work force and the labor shortage is still coming. It's still on its way. We see it now and in the next few years as baby boomers start to retire 8 in much larger numbers. As I said, we came upon more questions than answers. Where do we find the students ask where do we find them, why are they unqualified. Again, that collaboration between disability services and career services is really the key to answering both of those questions and then at the end of the presentation, I'll introduce to you another product or our most exciting product to help answer the first question of where do we find them. We will leave them to that point. I want to turn it over to Sarah as we talk about what we decided to do for a solution here at University of Tennessee. >> SARAH: Thank you Alan. I'm going to talk about the disability office, mission, services provided and more to get a better understanding of what our solution was here at UT of Tennessee and how to look about the research that Alan and Dr. Greenberg did. Through some very limited research with students are not achieving the same employment opportunities of abled peers. Specifically, a college graduate with a disability is 8 to 12 times more likely to be unemployed. Alan mentioned earlier that there was an article very 9 recently put into the journal of posteducation. Title employment and service and policy implications. I encourage everyone to look at that if you have a copy. The article mentioned the supposed unemployment rate. As Alan said, it's looking 33 to 45%, which is comparing to the unemployment rate of working students. This statistic is staggering and we have a very big concern about this unemployment rate and the difference between college graduates with disabilities and their peers without disabilities. If we go to the next slide, Aaron mentioned our mission at the beginning of the presentation, but just to reiterate the mission is in cooperation with UT career services and the office of disability services the purpose of the DCO is to assess individual college students and um alumni with opportunities with guidance. This mission has not changed since the conception of the careers office. So we want to show that there is an equal importance of working with both of these offices. Career planning services and guidance. That includes a wide range of services from general counseling and to disability specific sharing on topics like disclosure and reasonable 10 accommodations, which I will get to later in more depth. Looking at the next slide, I wanted to provide you with some information on the disability career office organizational chart. Just to give you an understanding of who I report to and how this works at Tennessee, Knoxville. Once again, I mentioned DCO does act as a liaison between both offices. But the focus is on career development and guidance. We thought that it was best to put in career services. So I report to the director of career services who reports to Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs and I work closely with the director of disability services here at University of Knoxville, who then report to student affairs. As you can see, both programmed are under the division of student affairs but they go through two different channels. But I work with the director of disability services very closely. It's very nice because this is on our campus and this is not how it's always been, but we are in one building. So career services is on the first floor and disability services is on the second floor. My office is located on the 11 second floor, which works nicely. Sometimes I feel isolated on career services staff. That's where the population is. I think it's best for my office to be located where the students actually are. If you look at the next slide, just to give you an understanding of what our annual budget is. As you will notice. It doesn't take a lot to get this project started. Hence my salary. But this is a simple look at the budget but fairly accurate. As Alan mentioned the DCO used to be under funding, which they had a specific budget they had to maintain. But now the DCO has gone to funding and part of the overall career service's budget. We have a new system within our career services here at University of Tennessee Knoxville where we have a college consult that reports to people. It serves within the liaison role. We're talking about in the future, maybe we can have each of those consultants in those areas of the colleges, including the DCO where we can do our own fund-raising in our area. So we can pull career services's out of our budget. That's probably a long time out. So DCO is very supportive within career 12 services but it is a part of the over all career services budget. The next slide just gives you an idea of the Texas students we're working with here, I provide you with a disability break down. This is fairly accurate. I created this at the end of last semester. So it's fairly up dated. This only includes students who are currently registered with the office of disabilities. It is not completely accurate in that it does not include our students that receive services or funding from the rehabilitation. Most of you will not be surprised by this in these numbers. This is fairly reflective of what we see throughout the country. Most students have not an apparent disability. All disability category are utilizing the DCO. Most in the spring semester have a psychiatric diagnosis. I have a slide later on that shows the DCO contact that I had with students of spring '06 semester. The next slide provides you with a list of the services we provide within the DCO. Again, there's a mixture of services from career paths to assessment tools, to job seeking skills. Then we get to more disability specific 13 information. Disclosure development, information and responsibilities under the law and things of that nature. So again, I serve as a liaison. I'm not in the business to reinvent the wheel. We have a wonderful career services staff. So to the contrary I am to ensure that I am utilizing the existing resources by the career office. Say a freshman comes to me and they're interested in accounting. I might provide them with some resources and perhaps we can do an assessment. But I would ultimately probably suggest that they go and talk with our college consultant in the college of business. She would have more information about accounting. She is really the expert. We serve as an intermediate spot, so to speak. The students come to us and we hope for that ultimate referral within career services who is the expert in that area. What we do know from research and the article I mentioned earlier, the article in the journal mentioned that students with disabilities are utilizing career services about one-third as often as their peers without disabilities. We're seeing this unemployment rate and noticing there is a very big difference 14 between how students with disabilities are utilizing career services, versus their peers utilizing career services. We have to keep that many mind. We know that students with disabilities are not accessing career services as much as we would like. The next slide I would like to talk a little bit more in depth about a couple of the services we provide. Self-advocacy is one of them. For those of you who are in disability services, I know you understand the difference between K-12 and higher education laws. A lot of people don't understand those laws and how it might affect their about to be self-advocates. I talk to my colleagues who review documentation and meet with the students. They're still stunned that they might not even understand their disability. Perhaps they may not have had a chance to overlook their documentation and so it is hard to be self-advocating. We're dealing with that definitely with students coming into higher education and low expectations. Some information that a lot of students with disabilities because of their parents being overprotective, just the lack of precollege 15 career planning, they might have some low expectations from their teachers or parents, which would inhibit their ability to be self-advocates. It allows them to speak out for themselves. We think this is extremely important and we need to teach students very early on. If they're unfamiliar with the career services and disability services a student will be contact in the middle without the proper training. So they don't know where to go to get help in this area. They begin to panic when starting to job search or they might avoid it at all because they haven't had an opportunity to learn those skills. The next slide talks a little bit more about self-advocacy. Alan mentioned the transition. Again, we hear a lot about the transition from high school to higher education. We hear a lot about the transition from high school to work. Each student who has an IEP should have a transition plan focused on higher education, work or inspect living. Alan talked about how we never hear this transition of higher education to work. Isn't that interesting. We are so focused on from school to school but we lose that focus when 16 working with our students with disabilities within the transition from higher education to work. The definition of self-advocacy is didn't within this transition. Though again, our students come into higher education, they meet with disability services, we help them review their documentation. We provider them with information to get to the faculty members. We're assisting them a little bit with the self-advocacy. But it's not a focus. We're not really working on the students with that. It's a subset, so to speak of what's taking place. The self-advocacy in the working place is very different than the definition of self-disclosure and self-advocacy within employment. The stakes are much higher. The protected and nonprotected environment. Again, this reiterates that it is extremely important that we're working with students as much as possible so they are feeling very prepared when wanting to go into the workplace or getting workplace experience sometime within their college career because it's hard to go into the workplace and worry about self-disclosure and self-advocacy. Going to the next slide, we're talking a 17 little bit more about disability disclosure. We want to provide you with a definition that we use of a volunteer act of revealing a disability for purpose of receiving accommodation and providing awareness. The idea of disclosure begins with the student having to disclose their disability to the faculty. We like the students the opportunity to practice using self-advocacy. In most circumstances these students will have information from the disability services office which will include the services they are allowed. Part of the disclosure and accommodation eligibility process has been completed through the disability office. This is the first time for many students to be responsible to self-advocate and disclose. We recognize that is good practice, but again, I think we need to hone in on that a little bit more and help them understand that disclosure will be different in the workplace. Going a little bit further into disability disclosure. This is something that I work closely with students on. They will be very concerned about disability disclosure. They don't know whether they need accommodations. 18 When starting the conversation about disability disclosure with students, we talk about questions of who am I? These are questions that should be asked during the college years of all students, but specifically for our students with disabilities we start the conversation with how does my disability play a role in my academics and employment. What is my match? Does my disability play a role within this? Should I be focusing on this area versus another area due to my disability? We don't assume that a student can't do anything. But we really work with them to critically think what the match might be for them based on an assessment of their likes and dislikes, their weaknesses and disabilities and what other needs beyond the class room. Hopefully we can get students within the DCO in fronts of me so we can be talking about this conversation about disability disclosure and having them to critically think about these types of questions. Then going on, again, focusing on disclosure -- I know we're spending a lot of time on this. But working with students I focus on disclosure. A lot of times students are coming to me with this fear of disclosure. So 19 kind of related to the past slide, we'll work with them to help them explore their feelings about disability. We come to the understanding that some students don't really know how they feel about their disability because they may be unaware of their disability and what this is exactly. Some are very self-confidently. I worked with some students and it wouldn't hinder their feelings because they feel positive about it. In talking about disability disclosure we want to help students to identify what accomodations they might need in the workplace. It's interesting because they're utilizing accommodations in higher education and sometimes they don't think they can transfer those accommodations to the workplace. We also talk about the benefits, risk of timing of disclosure. We spend a lot of time on disclosure strategies. They come in and want the answer. Sarah, tell me if I should disclose and when, what will happen if I do? I can't really do that. It will be based on their specific situation. But I can sit down and look at the risks and timing of disclosure and all the areas. That they disclose on a resume, during a job interview, before they get the offer or never. 20 We really look at the entire focus of strategies. So I just try to provider them with all the resources and hopefully they can make the decision that's best for them. We also talk about essential function. This is kind of a law jargon term within the Americans with disability act. I suggest they spend time to determine whether they need the reasonable accommodations. Many students refrain from disclosing if they feel they won't need accommodation. But some students feel they need to disclose because of awareness purposes only. This is up to the students. They need to think critically about the essential functions of that position to be able to try too determine if they are going to need accommodations within the workplace and if they should disclose. Lastly, we focus on a script. They initially think it is silly that we scripted out and gave them a narrative that they can use at any time if they chose to disclose. But we felt this was an opportunity for students to feel for comfortable when disclosing. We focus on skills, the positive aspect of their disability, their limitations, perhaps potential determined 21 reasonable accommodations. We talk about ensuring the disability with or without reasonable accommodations will not prevents them from performing the essential functions of the job. Hopefully when we have find of finished with that script preparation, they know a little bit more of how they would discuss disclosure, how to talk about their disability, how to talk about their skills and abilities and what they bring to the table in that position. We're trying to make the disability a factor in terms of their job process, disclosure, needing accommodations, but we don't want them to feel like it's going to be a barrier. We feel working with them to create a script will help them with that. Going on I wanted to talk a little bit about the law. I know that most of you are have familiar with the American with Disabilities Act. But asking student about the ADA, it is startling to see their understanding of their rights with the law. I talked to many students who do not know that having an employer ask a question in an interview about their disability is not legal. 22 And so we work with students and we provide them with information on the ADA so they become more familiar about their rights and responsibilities in regard to interviews and hiring. Some students, I talk with them, is it discrimination if I were not hired based on my disability? Yes, it would. It is very interesting. We cannot assume that these students understand the Americans with disability act and the rights they have under Title I employment. We feel it is important they are educated on the law. I help students understand that you need to look at every single job description to help you decide whether you are going to need those reasonable accommodations. Some students will get nervous because they don't know. I might not know by looking at the job description by what they mean. I say listen, when you get into the position, you might notice you need some more technology and that's okay. But don't let it get to failure until you have that conversation with your supervisor or your manager. Make sure you are calm about that and if you do realize within a couple months that you do need that accommodation then you want to have that conversation with your supervisor or manager. 23 Internship and employment opportunities. This is something we focus on in the DCO. I spend a lot of time learning about the internship specifically for students with disabilities and here at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville campus that don't focus on disability. I do think it is important that we really know there are some wonderful programs that are specifically out there for students with disabilities. You are probably familiar with most of these. We have worked with all of them. Disability mentoring day. We're very excited about that this year. We think it is going to be bigger and better than ever. We have had a lot of good response within the DCO. Entry point, emerging leaders, Microsoft program, Mitsubishi center for recruitment program. There are more out there that focus on college for students with disabilities. These are wonderful programs. This year we have one student who participated in the recruitment program who does have an internship in veteran affairs in DC. He's going to be starting in December and we're thrilled. We have three students that are going to participate in the Washington center. The 24 Washington center /PRO*FRS a scholarship for student with disability. They are going to participate with this great experience for very low coast. The Washington center is a really wonderful program. That's just a couple to name a few. But again, as the research is indicating, the unemployment rate is very differently between colleges and disabilities and those without disabilities and of course, they're showing not only are students accessing career services at a much lesser rate than their peers, but they are also participating in work based opportunities a lot less than their peers without disabilities. So I think it is our responsibility to be knowledgeable about these internships and experiences that are taking place on our campus so we can encourage our students. The students are not getting the appropriate work base experiences that will prepare them for the workplace. They'll potentially have an opportunity to disclose, the opportunity to learn whether they need accommodation in the workplace. Ultimately, they'll become competitive when applying for a full-time position. We want 25 these students to be just as competitive as their peers without disabilities. Also, employers are using internship programs as their most effective hiring tool for college graduates. So we want to be sure that students with disabilities increase their participation and work experiences. I'm going to change focus here a little bit and tell you how we get the word out individuals on our campus and outside our campus and how we get students in our office. Do they come willingly? Yes, they come willingly. They are not required to come. So we really focus on the disability services professional staff members to help us get them in our doors. We rely on them heavily. We rely on them more by far because they are really vital to the success of the disability career services office. Of course, career services professional staff members are wonderful referral source. We have to be careful because career professionals can only help those who are self-disclosed. So we have to make sure that they are not in the business of trying to diagnosis a student. Instead if a student sat down with them and disclose their disability, it is a wonderful 26 opportunity to say that we have this great careers office and that's when they refer them to me. We also work closely to the rehabilitation counselors within our area. Again, Alan mentioned the disability career office is funded through Tennessee rehabilitation. Now we're own University of Tennessee money, but that doesn't hinder ore relationship with VR. We rely on them for a lot of referrals. Referrals are VR are becoming less and less. We went to a mandate where a lot of money was lost. There are fewer and fewer colleges that are being serviced by VR. But they're very familiar with the DCO and they refer when they can. Career centers are a one shot deal. I think Tennessee career centers are specially helpful for them looking to stay in the Knoxville area. They have a lot of wonderful resources. Here in the Knoxville area we have a disability navigator and so I have created a relationship with him and there's been a couple of times where we have referred students back and forth. Or I told students do go there to get more information. Knoxville, we have a wonderful active disability service group within our area. So I 27 do work with them a let. So again, it's kind of few and far between that we're getting referrals from them, but they do refer from time to time. In regard to our next slide and outreach to students, we have a lot of ways to get the word out to students. I do have an E-mail listserv for all students and students with vocations. I send internship announcements and information about the DCO to reminds them. I use that a lot. I sends out a lot of E-mails. I try to make sure I don't overwhelm them because the last thing I want is for them to see my name and delete it. I think the E-mails I send out are rich with great resources and opportunities available. So we do use that a lot. Orientation is something we utilize this year. We had a few thousand students come through our orientation program. Our goal is to get students through the door as early as possible. So it is important for DCO to get with our orientation program. We had an expo that showed a lot of resources here at Knoxville. I stood in between for students looking for information about the disability career office. I think that worked out well. We got some information about the 28 existence of the disability career office and I think we will continue to do that in the future. Our campus newspaper, whenever I can, I put in an add about the disability careers office. I know students are reading that newspaper so it's a good way to get the word out. I have a bulletin board next to my office. I try to keep current job postings up there or just maybe to spark some interest and they can talk to me about that further. Brochures, we're working on a new one. We're in the process of updating that. But we do feel it is important to have some information that we can provide students and employers on our office. Then the career database. We're excited. We're in the process of getting a new software. We just launched it Monday. We feel like this new job posting database will help to reach students. The hope is that I will be able to kind of coach students who will not be seen. But I will be able to send targeted E-mails to the students with disabilities or with VR. Hopefully through this system I can do an instant gathering of resumes. We do have employers who are very 29 interested and excited about hiring and recruiting students with disabilities. If they contact me I can do a quick search and provider them with invention. This is going to be more personal than the E-mail I've been using. So we're looking forward to launching this software and to get the students interested. Alan is going to talk about career gateway which we're thrilled about. He's going to give you information about that later on. How do we work with employers? Due to the fact that I'm a one-person office although I have a great support staff with the disability services, I can't spend as much time developing employer relations, but I hope to really increase this in the future. We're hope to get a graduate student in the next few years so we can work directly with more employers. So at the career fairs I let them know of the existence of DCO. The students we're working with and get them interested in on-campus recruiting. We have hundreds of employers coming to our campus and having on-campus interviews and it is taking place around my corner. So as much as I can, I research the employers coming on campus to recruit our students and go and introduce myself 30 and the disability careers office. We have a very good qualified group of students. Of-campus visits. I will go to their site when I can. I can tour with their facility and become fault with organizations and what they offer. We know that diversity is a hot topic and a lot of employers are focused on diversity and recruiting a hiring people with different backgrounds. So it is important that I'm aware of that so I can provide that information to our students about those employers out there that are wanting to recruit them. Then of course, COSD, Alan W-will get to later. What a wonderful way to outreach with employers with those who are members of COSD. It is a wonderful opportunities for me to go to the COSD and get to meet those employers from sun trust, and Exxon mobile who are focused on this effort and how they can be working with us at University of Knoxville in recruiting our students. The reason I wanted to mention the constituents is that I do spends a lot of time outside of the campus working with those other disability providers focused on disabilities. A group of disability professionals that 31 are very much focused on increasing employment opportunities for students and job seekers within our area. Within that, we're actually hosting disability mentoring day. It used to be within our inspect living center here in Knoxville, but now that we have all these agencies here in Knoxville, we think it is a good place to hold it. We're looking forward to it and it will be better than ever before. We also do training. So it's great I get to learn about transportation issues, a lot of different topics. So this is a really great way for me to network with the college in the community and also learn and am able to take that information back with me to the DCO. The business advisory council are employers that have shown interest in recruiting a hiring students with disabilities and having that be a part of their diversity equation. So within the Knoxville consortium, we focus on different topics trying to keep them encouraged and motivated to continue focusing on recruiting and hiring individuals with disabilities. We just had our mayor come to talker about the importance of it and the business advisory council in getting involved with the mentoring day. We are getting more businesses interested 32 in this. A group of human resources professionals and that's just another good way to network with employers and get to know employers and companies within our area. Next slide, I mentioned earlier I wanted to show you an example of the student exact I had. I started my position is November here at University of Tennessee and so I wanted to capture the student contact that I had had within the first six months that I was here. As you can see, I do remain fairly busy. We have 62 student appointments. 38 of those were intakes. The first time students came to the office. We had 13 follow-up appointments. I hope to increase that. I try to work with the student within the appointment and we try to look at some goals and what we need to do for next time so they will continue to come in and utilize the services. Again, our goal is to get them in as early as possible. So we wants to keep them engaged from the major decision process to the full-time job search and the preparation process. Alan uses the word continuum a lot and I think that's appropriate. We need to market the services as a continuum. Where all parts of the 33 process need to be used to be prepared. Going to the next slide, DCO future goals. We always want to increase student participation. The DCO has been alive and well for a few years, but we're increasing the services that we're providing and so we would really like to see an increase in the student participation numbers. It was a little difficult because the coordinator in that position since the conception of the office and she was just amazing. She was here a few years and she left to take a different position. Then we had someone in an interim role and that was a little bit tough. Then she left and a couple months with no one in the position. So we're excited now that I am here and here to stay and hopefully we're going to increase the services that we're providing and increase our student participation numbers. As I mentioned, we will like to focus more on our employer participation. We need to be aware of a lot of employers, like here in Tennessee. It's something I want our students to be aware of. We talked with them about, hey, are you wanting to know what companies are out there and eager to hire students with 34 disabilities? And our answer is absolutely. I think it's important that I continue to learn about all the employers were working with and help them understand that we have a great qualified students on our campus and to help the students understand that we have employers want together hire them. And of course, increase participation and education. And any sort of work based experience opportunities is invaluable. The lists are provided a few slides back. We want students to be participating in all these and that's our goal and we want to increase that participation so they are more prepared in going to the work force. And creating a graduate position. Campus and community and employer relations. So I'm cross /-BG my fingers on that one and hope we will get a graduate assistant position available because I think that will just help in increasing and improving the services that we're providing for the DCO and then of course increasing funding. There's a lot I would like to do and we're all in a situation where we have limited funding. So I hope in the future for fund-raising efforts I hope we can get more for 35 the DCO and the services we're providing. I'm now going to give it back to Alan and he's going to talk about bringing it all together. >> ALAN: Thank you Sarah. Just kind of to wrap up here and to give you a little bit more perspective of how to DCO really does tie everything together. I wanted to talk again about the employers and Sarah talked about the enthusiasm we have here recruiting at University of Tennessee. We see that in searching for students with disabilities and also now establishing specific recruiting perhaps. They even have specialized personnel that are trained in recruiting students with disabilities but also working with employees with disabilities through maybe new hires or also those that have been with the company for a period of time. Also we're starting to notice even just in the last two to three years, a greater sophistication in the knowledge and language and actions of companies when it comes to a disability. When we first started this, there was a lot of lack of knowledge and lack of exposure 36 and lack of experience. But now we're starting to see that folks are realizing that this is an untapped market and willing to learn about it and research about it and be more involved in the issue and to find those folks that will increase the diversity of the company. In career services we saw that there needed to be an understanding of itself key role as the liaison between the student and the employer. Having to be more helpful and working with students with disabilities, we have got a long way to go with that. There are a lot of schools that have made tremendous progress and tremendous strides in working with this, but there's always more work to do. As new staff is added to career services as it is with disability services, we're constantly in a retraining mode and constantly making everyone aware of the issues and the subtleties that we found to be important in working with students with disabilities. We are training out there a few ideas. Sarah mentioned her being a one-person office, I'm a one-man office. I like to be in two or three places at one time, but I'm not able to. I do get out there quite a bit to do some training at various universities, but also at 37 employers and continuing to get the ball rolling in this area. COSD again, continues to encourage career services to reach out to disability services and as we switch to the last slide, looking at disability services and as I said and Sarah has mentioned again, the continuum of service is really important to continually keep in mind that we're working with students in the disability services from the time that they enter school to the time they graduate and sometimes even beyond. Career services very much the same way even though we can't seem to convince students that they need to be involved in career services in general early on, but we certainly want that to happen and particularly for students with disabilities. COSD continues to encourage involving the students with the employers. Again that outreach to career services that we feel is so important. On to the next slide, of course, we always have challenges. Some of the challenges can be overcome. The confidentiality, I wanted to leave for Sarah to talk about that. She has a closer understanding of that. 38 >> SARAH: Confidentiality is certainly a challenge and we need to keep in the forefront of our minds in this context of serving Disability Services and Career Services. We're not just working in disability services where the student has self-disclosed, provided that documentation. So how do we maintain that confidentiality between career and disability services? We have a confidentiality agreement. So I let them know there might be a time when I need to talk to a career services professional staff member about their situation. I also let them know that most of the time I do not needs to use their name in that situation. So if I don't need to completely disclose all their information, I will not do that. Most of the time it is not necessary. I will call a colleague and give them hypothetical questions and ask for more resources. We do look at a confidentiality agreement and make sure they understand that there might be a time that I need to speak to someone in career services about their situation. I never had a student who had an issue with that. But perhaps they had a bad experience with a career staff member. So if there's someone in the office they don't want me 39 to speak with, that's also their choice. And they can change their mind at any time. So we leave that up to the student. But we maker it clear that this is an understanding and an agreement and that we're both on the same page. We need to keep that in the forefront of our minds. Something when a student comes into the career services office and asks to speak with me, are they immediately specifically disclosing because I am primarily working with students with disabilities. So for instance, should we sends them to disability services even if they are only working with VR and not registered with the disability services but just to maintain that confidentiality. We're also looking at our new software, job listing software. How can they use that administratively and how to get it out to the students for internship opportunities. That's something we need to think about all of the time and make sure we're maintaining confidentiality as much as we can. >> ALAN: There's never enough time within either office, but what we encourage folks to do is to take a few seconds and a few minutes of each student interaction to help the student to 40 be more aware of both offices. That's really all we're asking as far as collaboration in many cases. Then as you add more sophistication to that collaboration, then of course, there's more interaction and more information that needs to be shared. Also we found there's not enough knowledge regarding disability in the career services office and we're working on that to come up with a training program. In fact, that's what I do. Going out and doing my presentations and just letting them know about these things and to help them understand disability a little bit better. The flip side also for working with disability services to become more aware of careers and how the career preparation process actually works. As we quickly move on to the next slide, there are some programs that I wanted to very briefly highlight. A small liberal arts school has nothing to do with being my alma mater. It is on Long Island in New York. They have taken the COSD model of collaboration between disability services and career services to a very high level. They do mostly everything within the disability services office and have a 41 designated person to hand the student off to career services. It is a very successful program at a relatively small school. But it does seem to work. Cal Berkeley has the workability for a program for their own VR program that's extremely successful in career preparation and job readiness for students with disabilities. Florida International University is doing a version of the Disability-Careers Office and they are doing a couple steps beyond in providing direct customer service to students. In Indiana, they have done a greatly job of having a very close collaboration between the two offices. That is something that we can really look to as another example. The DO-IT program out at the University of Washington is a program through the university there and they have a program called AccessSTEM which is dealing with science, technology, engineering and math type of folks who are looking to have additional career readiness. As we move on to the next slide, I will leave some briefly for Sarah. >> SARAH: Again, Alan mentioned that the DCO is a model, an example. It is the model for us at the University of Tennessee. We're always 42 looking to improve. We know we have ways in which we can change things and improve our sources and make our mold even better. You have to think what's best for your institution. Maybe your student population or funding resources or the way your career offices on your campus work. But think about what can you do within the premise of COSD to bring the collaboration of career services and disability services. So learning about the roles of each office. Making sure you are opening up lines of communication. So at least you have an understanding that if a question would come, it wouldn't just be dropped. The line of communication would be open. Appointing a professional staff member in each department. A contact or creating a program that bridges the two departments like we have done here. That would be best for your institution. We encourage you to do anything to help kinds of create that collaboration on your campus if it hasn't already been established. >> ALAN: Okay. And also well -- as Sarah has done a great job in articulating what the disability careers office is, it's a national example. But itself particularly been driven by COSD. So there's a mutual benefit there because 43 I use the innovation that Sarah is considering and ready to implement and way of talking about the collaboration between the two offices. So let's move on and talk a little bit about COSD in a brief way. You can read the slide here as it is a summary of what COSD is. But it's an organization of about 450 member organizations, again, representing a lot of different higher education institutions. And again, a big piece of it is two year schools. That's a growing area. We also have a great number of employers and large government agencies that are a part of us. So we all work together to work on increasing the employment rate of college graduates with disabilities in careers. Then, I wanted to take the last few seconds we have left to talk about this exciting new product that we're launching this week to our major national sponsors and those of you who are member institutions of COSD will be receiving some goodies in the mail of our marketing pieces that are really nice to use and very professionally and slick looking. Good stuff. But COSD gateway is a national recruiting database that is specifically focused on college 44 students with disabilities. It is the only database out there that is dynamic and is real time and its about to have communication between the students and employers and the benefit to the students is that it provides the closest contact that they'll have to an employer that are looking for them and looking to hire them. Initially for the near future, we're only limiting it to COSD employer members. Only those that have a sincere desire to be judged by me, of course, but that sincere desire to hire those with disabilities and to focus on college students. What we encourage you guys to do is to be our voice to students with disabilities on your campuses, to encourage them to try this system. And what's great for the employers, too, it allows the employers that are saying gee, where are the students? How come we can't find them? This is a great doesn't for them to find qualified students with resumes available on line and then it is up to them to make the decision whether they come to that particular campus and interview that particular student or series of student that may be on that one campus. But we're trying to the best we can to provide the closest and most director contact 45 for students with disabilities and to help them really stand out as opposed to even going to their own campus recruitment system that the individual campus career services office has. We're not discouraging them from doing that but this to be a supplement in doing that. Just another avenue for students for employers who are looking for them. This is a great product and we're looking for some support from you guys out there to encourage your students for this system. I think that's it for both of us and we would like to open it for questions. >> AARON: We have far more questions than we have time for, but a big chunk of them were answered in the course of your talks. Sarah, specific question came in asking if you could clarify the number of students, the total students you serve. The question was confused as to student appointment and intakes. If you can detail that. >> SARAH: I apologize if that was confusing. Overall between November and April, I had a total of 62 student appointments. 38 of which were brand new students to the DCO. So it was a first time come together see me and first time utilizing the DCO at all. So overall I saw 62 students. Part of that 62 is 13 follow-up 46 appointments that I had and then I saw some that came to me not specifically for intake. But overall 62 appointments between the month of November and April. >> ALAN: That number is going to increase now that she's going to be here for a full academic year. Don't let that number be the idea of it's a standard number. Sarah is looking to be double that number. But that's something we're definitely within reach of doing to see 150 students. >> AARON: Several questions deal with -- are basically asking if you can disclose the process of how you developed your materials on interviewing and disclosure and whether or not you would be willing to share those materials or more specific information about them? >> ALAN: I can answer that since the original coordinator of the DCO and I were the ones who put the materials together. We borrowed a lot of things from the University of Minnesota, which by the way has done just incredible pioneering work in this area and we're so glad to have them as one of our more faithful institutions. But I can say, yes, we will share that information to anyone who wants to E-mail either 47 me or Sarah. It's a nice handy packet that talks about what the questionnaire is and is the basis for the script that Sarah was talking about. Also there's another wonderful matrix in there that talks about the timing of when to disclose and it talks about the, I call them opportunities to disclose within that interview or career search process. And it also talks about the benefits, the down side and also different implications and the things that the student needs to understand in order to make that decision. So great little tool that is very nice and very general but still specific enough to help students to make that decision themselves. We hand those out to individuals along with questionnaire items that is the basic of that script. >> SARAH: Also utilizing other resources out there. I have contacted other accommodation options. I'll make a phone call to a job accommodation network and they'll provide me with more information. That's been a wonderful opportunity and they are so accessible. I use them a lot. Also the materials at Washington. I use 48 that a lot. I provide that information a lot to students and I tell them to utilize that website. We still borrow a lot. >> ALAN: We could brag. Notice there's credit on everything. >> SARAH: We credit everyone. Anything about the law, I sent people right to the government site. If they just do a Google search, I might be not be sure what they'll find. So I send them right to the government website. >> AARON: I want to encourage listeners to look at our archives where we have produced some webcasts. So there's some material that would back up today's speaker's claims about how good their product is. A lot of the -- the next question guys are addressing disclosure and internships and request for accommodations in internships and more specifically, there are six questions about this, about the incoming role or requirement of schools to have students as part of the degree plan, and I know you covered this speech somewhat. , externships and student teaching where that is a required component or community service, for example, that's a required components of a degree, -- this questions are along these lines. Have you been developing 49 content for that quasi workplace environment and have you been encountering the programs where internship sites are reluctant to provide that or even an employer? >> SARAH: Of course, like we have talked a lot before. Whether it's a paid job, a part time job, internship, of course, we would like it to be as career related as possible because we feel like this is the most valuable. But we're encouraging that all the time. I think that we would both like to see that more of their curriculum where they are encouraging their students to participate their experiences. Some here at the Universities of Tennessee and some are not. I think in the future, we will continue to see an increase of that. Because of course, on the other side, this is where we're really recruiting and hiring our students. I think that statistic continues to grow, I think more academic programs will have that be a part of their requirements. When Alan was doing the initial research, he was speaking with employers. It's not that we're not eager. First of all we don't know when the find they happen and then when we do, why are they unqualified? So we want to provide them with that experience and to be more prepared and 50 qualified. >> ALAN: A big factor of that is work experience. As far as actually materials that we have already created, we don't have that. Although a lot of the material that is available, it can be more than applicable to an academic type of work experience. When you go to like a north eastern university or any other university that is heavy in engineering, their co-ops are going to be absolutely required. Those folks have already done a lot of great work in being able to assist students to handle those questions. That's a great question. What we'll do is we'll talker to our friends at north eastern and see if they have anything that would more specific toward this area. Again, to really answer the question, I think that we're dealing with a lot of the same issues. I think that the material that we have already produced that we are, again, able to provide you would answer most of that question. A number of other questions deal with students who are in noncredit classes. Who are pursuing certification or who are taking, again, a postsecondary continuing education course, do you or any member institutions reach out and 51 work with those students? >> ALAN: As far as adult education? >> AARON: For example, classes for paralegals leading to certification but nondegreed? >> ALAN: Generally, again, I speak for career services because this is where that would come in. Most of the time if the student is earning credit hours, then they are a student as far as I understand the process. Then they become qualified or eligible for career services functions to use correctly and more completely. But also, alumni are open to be able to or eligible to use career services in the same way as a student would. >> SARAH: I guess just to add to that, there's been quite a few times I worked with students who are not Universities of Tennessee Knoxville students and maybe looking at this as an option. I try to help them with their career planning and development and try to figure out what is best for them in terms of a program that we have here at Universities of Tennessee Knoxville or outside of the campus. >> ALAN: Again, Sarah did not mention this but this is something we talk about a lot is that many of her students are nontraditional. There are not of the traditional age. We're kinds of 52 talking about the same thing here. We're talking about training that goes from one career to the next or supplementing a career that may have started without a college degree. To answer your question, most of the time we deal with students who are actually enrolled in the institution in credit earning hours. >> AARON: All right. I regret to leave. We're against the wall in terms of time. I want to thank you both for participating and remind the people who have sent in questions that we haven't dealt with specifically, we always encourage you that you contact us for your area technical assistance number to answer any questions that are coming up. I promise you individually we will answer the E-mail questions that have already arrived that we haven't had time to or were off topic. We will do so through our system. >> ALAN: Can I interrupt you? Quickly, negligently left our contact information off of the slides. If you please provide that to the folks on the calling that would be great. >> AARON: We will make sure that's put up on our webcast and I'm going to remind everybody about our archiving process. I want to thank both of our providers for participating today 53 and offering some insight into why consider such an intuitive approach to that issue. It seemed when I first encountered it, we should have thought of it. I thank you for participating. In closing, I hope everybody who has been listening and send in your questions has learned a lot from today's webcast and enjoyed it as much as I have. I want everyone to know that this webcast will be archived in its entirety. Webcast@ilru.org. You can check out the ILRU website for upcoming webcasts that have been schedule and again I encourage you to do so. Additionally, before closing I would like to acknowledge the National Institute on Disability Rehabilitation Research, NIDRR, who host today's program, the Disability Law Resource Project. I encourage anybody with questions on the American with Disabilities Act or other Federal laws that impact disability rights to call that free technical number. 1-800-949-4232. I would say also to thank the in-house staff of the ILRU who without their effort this webcast would not be possible. They include our webcast team of Tajauna Dunning, Marj Gordon, Dawn Heinsohn, Vinh Nguyen and the expertise of Rob Dickehuth and our real time captioner Lauren Kellmann. Thank you for your 54 good work and Rob for your technical expertise. Have a good day and please check out our calendar of upcoming webcasts. Good-bye.