Preparing for the Future: Services for Transition Age Students

Preparing for the Future: Services for Transition Age Students

American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Future Reflections Convention 2017 NOPBC BOARD MEETING
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Preparing for the Future
Services for Transition Age Students
by Dick Davis
Introduction by Kim Cunningham: If your child isn't ready yet for transition services, it will happen before you know it. Our next speaker is Dick Davis, chairperson of the NFB Employment Committee. Until his retirement he was associate director and a career instructor at BLIND, Inc. in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Welcome to Dick Davis!
I know this sounds strange to those of you who have very young children, but one of these days your kids are going to go off to college, or maybe off to work. At that point you're going to have empty nest syndrome.
What are the symptoms of empty nest syndrome? It's when you look at your spouse for the first time in years without anybody standing between you saying, "Mommy mommy mommy mommy!" You're going to look at your spouse and say, "Who are you and what are you doing in my house?" If you don't think that's true, just wait! Kids have a way of changing our relationships, and we have to reconstruct them after they move on.
What's the alternative to having your kids go away and having to go through this reconstruction? It's that you're seventy years old, and you have this kid at home, and you're thinking, “I'd love to retire, but I don't know what to do with Jackie!" Unfortunately, some parents never prepare for that eventuality. Their kids stay at home, not doing anything for the rest of their lives. I don't think anyone here wants that scenario.
What makes the difference between sending your kids off to work or college, or being stuck with them for the rest of your life? It has to do with the transition period. Age fourteen to eighteen, or whatever age kids get out of high school, is the transition stage. There's a phrase that's used, pre-employment transition services, or PETS. I don't happen to like that acronym. The goal is to not have your children be pets! [Laughter] You want to get them out there working so when you retire they'll have enough money to help you out for a change.
What do you need to do in the transition period? First of all, you need to watch out for a big thing that's going to happen at age eighteen. When your blind children turn eighteen, they're going to become eligible for SSI (Supplemental Security Income). If they're still at home and you're supporting them, they'll get $550 a month. If they're paying you rent, because as parents you decided they should contribute (which is a good idea), then they're going to get $735 a month. It's not much money when you think about it, but to your kids it's going to look like all the money in the world! SSI has an unfortunate tendency to make people dependent on those monthly checks. People start to think they can't go to work because they'll lose their SSI benefits.
The rules around SSI are very complex, but let me give you a simple piece of information. Going to work will always help your child if he's on SSI. If your child is a student, up to the age of twenty-two, the Social Security Administration will ignore almost nine thousand dollars in earnings per year. Social Security wants students to save money for college. Even though they don't make a big deal about it (and they should!), Social Security really wants people to go to work. So if you remember anything about SSI, remember that it will always want people to go to work.
If you want to learn all about SSI and work incentives, there's something called the SSDI Red Book. You can find it at ssa.gov. The Red Book is your pathway to learning about all of the work incentives that Social Security has built in to make it financially advisable for your child to go to work. Please look it up and become familiar with it. It will teach you all kinds of things that you don't know about your child's benefits.
Why is this such a challenge? People who are getting $735 a month sometimes think they have all the money they need. They want to buy this and buy that. That's great for them, but most people in this country who are not blind have to work if they want money. You're going to have to build in incentives to get your child to work. The transition period is the time to do that.
Kids can start to work at age fourteen. The US Department of Labor has a lot of rules about what they can and can't do. There are restrictions about how many hours they can work. At the age of fourteen they can't run machinery. Basically they can do things that won't cut their arms and legs off.
As kids get older, the rules loosen up. By the age of sixteen they can run mixers and ice cream machines. By the time they're eighteen they're adults, and all of the restrictions are gone.
BLIND, Incorporated, the organization from which I am semi-retired, has some great year-round and summer programs for transition age blind kids. One of our programs is the PREP Program. The kids get a month of adjustment to blindness training and a month of paid employment experience. They earn at least minimum wage. They bring the money home. It's theirs to keep.
If you remember when you were a kid and you had your first job, you know it's the coolest thing ever to have somebody hand you a paycheck! It's the coolest thing not to have to go to Mom or Dad to beg for money! It's the coolest thing on earth not only to earn money, but to know that you are worth something. Believe me, you can have all the wonderful rehabilitation programs in the world and all the self-esteem-building programs, but until somebody hands you a paycheck, you don't really believe it. Why should you? When somebody thinks you're worth hiring, that is the greatest boost to a person's self-confidence.
You may be wondering, where's the money for these programs going to come from? This PETS program that I mentioned earlier is funded through a 15 percent set-aside from your state agency's vocational rehabilitation budget. It is irrevocable. Congress made it very clear that they want so much money put into this because for years rehab agencies haven't done anything with these kids. Special education people haven't been able to help, either; most special education people don't know anything about jobs for blind students. Neither do middle-school and high-school guidance counselors.
Our society has a bias. It has the idea that if you send people to college and get them a liberal-arts degree, everything is going to be fine. That's not the case anymore. It hasn't been the case since the 1960s. A college degree does not guarantee you a job.
Rehab programs must fund transition services. I know that some NFB affiliates are setting up PETS programs now. Please look into them. Please give your kids the opportunity to go to work before SSI kicks in. Visit our Employment Committee website, employment.nfb.org. Thank you very much!

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