DARRELL JONES: Okay, we're going to start going through some of the questions that you had. We won't have time to get through the whole list, but the first thing I wanted to mention is that a couple of the questions that came in had to do with templates that you could steal. Appropriate. Adapt. And Joe has provided us with a template for the person centered planning that he talked about yesterday. And also with a sample billing template that has billing codes. We're going to post both of those on the website that we have created for this training. We will send you that link after the training so watch your E-mail when you get back home. We'll give you some instructions on how to use that site and where to find things. Let's start with some burning questions. We've had a number of folks raise the issue of order of selection and I wondered if I could call on the New Hampshire folks. Did you have some insights that you wanted to share on that? PETER DARLING: What question? DARRELL JONES: It's not on your list. This is one that has been coming in from several sources. PETER DARLING: On the order of selection? AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you select? DARRELL JONES: Order of selection. AUDIENCE MEMBER: VR order of selection. DARRELL JONES: Richard, if you could clarify that question for us. RICHARD PETTY: Let me try to clarify here. This came up in our discussion this morning and it may be that if we're not ready to address this right now, we can come back to it. But I'll just highlight the discussion. The question is whether or not the models that we're talking about are affected by order of selection, that means that when a rehabilitation agency, because of limited resources, someone can say this better than I can, but let me try, prioritizes who is served based on significant levels of disability. And there was some thinking this morning on the part of the VR director in New Hampshire that that could be an issue and my sense is that there are ways to address that and we may talk about in this evening as presenters and come back tomorrow and have some response. RICK WALTERS: This is Rick from Pennsylvania office of vocational rehabilitation and we are on an order of selection right now. And that means we do not have enough funds to serve all people with disabilities, so by federal law we need to fund services to people who are considered to have more significant disabilities at this point in time. Clearly you can see that that hasn't stopped us or even slowed us down in working in transition with the Lehigh Valley CIL and our other excellent providers of services to youth in transition. I don't know if that really answers your question, but it AUDIENCE MEMBER: It helps. ABBIE WELLS HERZOG: I could speak to it as well. Minnesota is on order much selection also and of course that's going to affect, we're serving the most significantly disabled folks that apply for our services. We do have a wait, a small waiting list. And we're hopefully going to be coming off of it. I know our director, Kim Peck, is hopeful we'll be able to come off of it within the next few months and, you know, we continue to serve, we continue to refer folks to the IL services that are based in our office, but these also are going to be the folks that we are currently serving. So that would restrict the people who are on the list. So because they are on the waiting list. So of course that's going to affect services there. DARRELL JONES: Thank you. Anyone else up here want to speak to that? Okay, let's move to a question that I think we were going to give to Joe that had to do with staying connected after transition. JOE MICHENER: Hi, yeah, that is a problem of course with any program where there could be a potential for some finality. But what we've done at LVCIL is create things like our Career Path Club. We also have a community club where young adults that have gone through our programming and maybe are no longer receiving support through our program are invited back on a regular basis. Our community club meets monthly. Our Career Path Club meets every couple of months, well, most of the time. And our young adults often, who have been successfully employed and moved on to other things in their life come back to those. And it is a huge networking opportunity for those young adults. They talk to each other. Young adults have gotten each other jobs through those. Young adults that are currently going through the program and maybe looking for a job, talk to somebody else who is employed somewhere and say, hey, why don't you come work with he, my place is hiring. So that's really the best way for us to stay connected. We facilitate those events, meaning we provide space for them. And the young adults determine what they want to do on a regular basis, whether it is go play laser tag or have a party or whatever the case may be. But it's an element that we do at the CIL. VR doesn't pay for that. Schools don't pay for that. That is something we kind of incorporated because in our skills training in the S2L program, we just saw the immense need for the social aspect and to stay connected. We facilitate and provide the space and it's been really wonderful for, especially it's also really rewarding for those who have gone through our programs to come back and share their stories and to inspire other folks that are coming through our programs. DARRELL JONES: Good. Anyone else want to add? Okay, one of the questions that came in that we thought everyone up here could have a chance to respond to if we had the time, we'll ask whoever has an interest in responding to this. The question, it really wasn't a question, it just said family care giving versus IL philosophy? And last night in our debriefing session, there seemed to be some interest among several of you to respond to that. SETH HODEREWSKI: Hi there. We talked a little bit about this in our morning session as far as transition and our young adults going through transition and our families also, you know, they are also transitioning as the young adults are transitioning. It is transition. That is life. So there are some specific things that we do. We have our young adult group, our S2L group, where our young adults get together and that is theirs. They do not want the parents there. They don't want them associated with it in any way. That is their group and theirs only. We also have a parents group. They get together on a regular basis. We have speakers come in, talk about different transition related opportunities. Gives them opportunities to support each other and with that whole cross disability type of thinking, that's a little bit, someone may learn from someone else in their approach and the things that they've had to go through. So, you know, that along with the fact that they are doing some advocacy-based things. They are trying to make a difference, not only for their young adult, but also for other young adults in Pennsylvania. So that's kind of what we do. JOE MICHENER: I just wanted to add also, through our person-centered planning model oftentimes parents and caregivers are at those meetings, but it is highlighted throughout the course of the meeting, throughout the documentation we use to document the meeting, everything we do that the most important person in the room is the young adult. And yes, that can be quite a challenge. The one thing I will say, and I think we fall in this trap sometime where we say, oh, if it just wasn't for the parents, we would be okay. Right? I know and it's hard for me to even say it. I think the one thing I've learned over the last few years is that that is probably not going to change. We have parents who are way too involved. We have parents who are not involved at all and our job is to try to, well, I can think of a specific instance where we have a parent who is extremely over bearing and doesn't allow their young adult to do anything independently. And our goal is to try to help that parent grow. And I think that's what we focus on and, yes, in the end that parent can make our lives very difficult, but we do everything we can to promote that independence. DAVE HANCOX: I would like to address that real quickly as well with an anecdote here. I remember a couple of years ago when we were, we had a young man who was at our center and was learning some independent living skills, including how to do his own laundry. And his mother was very upset with us. Because he can't do laundry. And I walked her into our classroom area where we have a washer and dryer set up, and I had him demonstrate, this is how you prepare the washer with your clothes and the dial and everything and she kept insisting he can't do this, he can't do this. Even with him standing there demonstrating right in front of her that he knew how to set the dial and select the water temperature, she just had it so set in her mind that he can't do this. That it was impossible for her. So what we, by way of that anecdote, what we do at the METRO center is, and I start right at the interview process. When I'm interviewing staff for transition positions, I pose that situation to them. There is going to come a time, I will tell them, when in your advocating for the young person, you're going to be at odds with the parents. What do you do? And I put them on the spot in that interview process to answer that question by way of not just gaining something insight into their skills at diplomacy, so to speak, but also to let them know that this is an expectation that your representation is the student. That's who you're working for and that from time to time you're going to have to expect to negotiate those relationships and those boundaries with the parents. Not casting the parents in that evil demon light necessarily, but this is a situation that is going to come up and you have to be prepared to negotiate your way through that. DARRELL JONES: Thanks guys. Let's go over here to New Hampshire. One of the questions is about the ELO program, the extended learning opportunities program. Program staff only work with this program, not other consumers. KENNETH DUESING: Hi. The ELOs are available to all students in the school district. It's not just students with disabilities and we talked about this in one of our sessions this morning. That when we have the teaching staff certifying the work that the students have done, those are teachers in the school district who'll be the English certified teacher who looks at the work that the students have done through the Eearn and Learn program. Students are working on come computer online programming. They are working with local banks, local health care workers to do whatever projects to meet those competencies, but then school staff come in to grade the work, certify that it meets our competencies. So there is not, I guess the question is, you know, program staff I think is twofold. It's people actually working with the students, but then it's teachers certified in those areas to come in and judge the competencies, and again the Earn and Learn program is one specific program, but we have extended learning opportunities for students throughout the school district that could do other things that might be individualized to that student as opposed to participating in this specific program. DARRELL JONES: Thanks, Kenneth. Let's take one more question. We'll give you guys a break before our next session starts at 1:15. We're starting at 1:15 today instead of 1:30 and that's our VR panel. This was directed to Dave, but probably all three of the centers have some thoughts about this. This is the one about what is the benefit of choosing grant writing or programs? Can't you do both was the question. DAVE HANCOX: and definitely you can do both. It's not a one or other. At the METRO Center for Independent Living, several years ago when I first became Executive Director, we made a conscious decision within our organization to really prioritize the development of fee-for-service approach. And that's worked really, really well for us. Intermittently throughout these years we've gone after some small grants. We went after one rather large grant in collaboration with our state association. We just happened to be the lead. It was a collaborative grant among the eight centers. We, from time to time, will go for small foundation grants as well, but we do those, at least within our shop, we pursue those grant opportunities from foundations with either corporate or family foundations that are relevant to a specific project. We don't look for those to satisfy our core service needs because typically they're not sustainable dollars. So that's why we have prioritized a fee-for-service approach within our center. But it's not, it's not an either/or. You can certainly do both. If I gave the impression otherwise yesterday, I apologize. But we just really prioritize, 87 percent of the dollars, the revenues that flow into MCIL are dollars that we earn through some type of fee-for-service or performance-based contract. About 10 percent of the revenues are the core service dollars that we receive, like many of you do, the Part C dollars and the state dollars that we receive that are earmarked specifically for core services and then the remaining 2 percent or so are dollars that we either get through donation, through earned income, our investment income, small grant writing and things like that. We just really made the conscious decision to prioritize fee-for-service over grantsmanship. That was just a choice for our center. Others? AMY BECK: I know we were asked about this a little bit at one of the breakout sessions, but at LVCIL we definitely use both. We are open to all things. We'll talk about this tomorrow, a little bit about how did we start moving in the fee-for-service direction, and our board said many times you can't be relying only on grants. You can't be relying only on grants and that led us into developing our sign language interpreter referral services but that also started with a grant, one of those innovation grants that allowed us to respond to a community need that we saw that OVR saw, but through the Developmental Disabilities Council, we've been able to use some of those grants. You know for our Center for Independent Living, a four year grant of $100,000 a year is very significant. And is almost half of what we get for our core services, so we've been able to use that to develop programming and at times you have to watch because you can spend just as much time writing a grant for a 2,000-dollar award as you might spend to write a 200,000-dollar award. So you do have to find some balance, but we, for example, have consistently written and received some small awards which has allowed us to develop an emergency food outreach program. I talked to you about how many of our consumers are impoverished. Our staff are saying, Amy, I feel bad that my lunch box is sitting in my cubicle because my consumers are hungry. We developed a program to give gift cards to consumers in crisis need and gift cards from grocery stores so they can buy food, medical supplies or prescriptions. So we found some nice niche uses of grants, but we would not be where we are today if we had not used grants to help us get started. PETER DARLING: Well, we don't rely heavily on grants, but we apply heavily on grants. I would say that they are my bane personally. However, if you need a quick thing, I say if they add value and not staff, that would be the rule of thumb. What would that maybe be AMP projects, access modification is one of our programs and typically in a good year we'll get anywhere from 25 to $50,000 extra money, and again it's not for staff, it's to build the ramp, but we wouldn't be able to build them if we didn't apply or build as many. So again that to me is a value added to apply it to what we're gathered here around. When we designed and created our initial budget for Earn and Learn, we didn't use, we hadn't anticipated the full utilization of the computers. So when kids left at one o'clock, we probably had a room full computers. That's a terrible waste. So we quickly found ways to bring these students back in to get more credits, but we didn't have any staff allocated against that. So on an annual basis, because neither of our partners had bought into that cost, we've been writing small grants, you know, $5,000 or so to sustain that. So, again, add value. Staff gets scarey. DARRELL JONES: Okay, thanks guys.