Dressed in crisp white shirts, decked with nametags that read “Career Program,” and black pants, Sir Charles Tupper secondary students Eddie Zhou and Lily Tan maneuvered a rolling cart into the elevator and up to the sixth floor of the Ramada hotel on West Pender. They stripped a bed as their special needs support worker repeated variations of, “Eddie, you know what to do.”
Earlier, the teenagers, looking like giant white Smurfs in head-to-toe protective clothing, finished painting over the tagged back alley wall of the hotel, something even Sergio Apila, their support worker who assists them at work experience and at school, seemed dubious about.
After they collected bedding and vacuumed the breakfast and break room, hotel staff quickly gathered to wish Zhou and Tan well.
“Ni hoa, today’s my last day,” Zhou greeted one of the hotel staffers in Mandarin.
“You can call me Edward, always,” he told one hotel employee.
“You can call me Eddie,” he told others, greeting everyone by name.
“Sad,” was how Zhou told the Courier he was feeling about their last day on the job.
“I won’t cry,” added the 18-year-old, who is on the autism spectrum.
Experience wanted
Zhou enjoyed painting most and Tan loved handling laundry. They initially struggled with holding mops and paint rollers, but once they’d practiced these motor skills, they completed related tasks expertly.
Both say they’d like to work in a kitchen once they finish high school. Tan has already worked at White Spot through the Vancouver School Board’s job training for youth with disabilities program, and Zhou wants to take the 10-month food preparation course at Vancouver Community College that he visited on a school field trip last year.
Zhou and Tan, both Grade 12 students, will be able to complete an extra year of high school because they will still be 18 by the end of the 2015-2016 school year. Derek McQuillen, work experience transition facilitator for this career program of the VSB, said Zhou already told him he wants to work at Denny’s next year.
McQuillen and Pam Neuman, the school board’s post-secondary transition low-incidence consultant, have doubled special needs students’ exposure to work experience in the community in the last three years. Now 200 students learn skills such as stocking shelves at Superstore, cleaning cars for Dueck, and providing animal care and cleaning cages for the B.C. SPCA.
“The kids have come back really proud of all of their placements,” said Tupper Life Skills teacher Allison Frers. “They come in, walking in with their uniform that says the company that’s supporting them.”
McQuillen completes an intake interview with students in Grade 10, showing them pictures of jobs they might want to do.
“Our students are kinesthetic learners. They really can’t conceptualize what a job might look like,” McQuillen said. “So, definitely the exploration piece is paramount for them.”
Students complete three unpaid work experiences in Grade 10 and another three in Grade 11. They work three months, one day a week for about four hours in pairs, while a support worker helps them, noting which tasks they need help with, which they can do independently, and what they enjoy most.
Support workers photograph students during their work experiences, creating a visual resume they can show future employers to demonstrate what they can do. In their final year, students work independently, perhaps in a job that’s been customized for them.
If a student is doing well in a job, McQuillen will talk to an employer about the possibility of them continuing on in paid employment. He connects students to case managers at WorkBC Employment Services Centres, which have funding to customize jobs for people with developmental disabilities.
“It’s important for us that we do connect them to an employment agency so that they’re followed after we leave the picture,” McQuillen said. “If the responsibilities of that position change, the student has resources in order to advance their knowledge and their skill set with the work.”
Over the last three years, McQuillen and Neuman have focused on finding ongoing employment for students leaving school, helping 20 students secure part-time jobs.
These former students can earn up to $800 a month without losing their disability benefits of $906 a month that they’ll receive once they turn 19.
“The statistics show that if a student with a developmental disability has a part-time job before they finish high school, then their quality of life indicators skyrocket in comparison to those who don’t have that same opportunity,” McQuillen said.
He and Neuman are keen to establish social enterprises that could employ their students and are developing a market garden at Gladstone secondary.
Making plans
Neuman started helping students with developmental disabilities plan their transition from high school three years ago. Students now take a course called “self determination” and develop a comprehensive life plan that includes their goals for the school year and the next three to five years. They present this blueprint to their parents, administrators and teachers and their vision is incorporated into their individual education plan.
Neuman and others have also helped students focus on basic skills such as taking transit.
“We spent a full day on eye contact and hand shaking,” she added. “We spent a lot of time practising and role modelling interviews.”
This year, 10 students are entering a gateway to post-secondary programs where they’ll attend college three days a week and high school the other two days a week so they’ll get used to taking transit and functioning in a less structured milieu. McQuillen expects another 10 students to enter this program in September, 10 more in January.
“Those are all kids who would have been waiting for day programs to open up. It can be a year or two wait and sometimes they’re not always suitable,” Neuman said.
“Sometimes kids can end up in programs with 50- and 60-year-olds ... and these are 19-year-olds.”
When young adults with developmental disabilities don’t have work, school or a day program to go to, families suffer.
“A lot of families, somebody has to quit their job when their kids are 19,” Neuman said.
She said getting students with developmental disabilities employed or furthering their education before they leave high school benefits everyone. She’d like students who will graduate with an Evergreen Certificate, instead of a Dogwood Diploma, to be expected to complete work experience, too.
“It’s a win-win for everybody in society if our population is working,” Neuman said. “For the families, for the kids, for society, for the employers, for everybody.”
Model employees
Shawn Martell, the Ramada hotel’s director of sales and marketing, learned the VSB matches students with developmental disabilities with employers when McQuillen was helping her son who’s in Grade 10 and on the autism spectrum find work.
She’s seen how terribly people can treat people who seem different and has talked about opening up a café her could run so he could earn money and live on his own.
But she says she didn’t convince her general manager to employ Zhou and Tan because of her son.
“It’s the right thing to do,” she said.
Her coworkers thought so, too.
Martell had only intended to occupy Zhou and Tan with housekeeping duties but Dan Milicevic, the chief engineer who oversees maintenance, heard they were coming, he requested they help him, too.
“They could have been my children,” he told the Courier.
Then he whipped out his cellphone to show off the before and after photos of the tagged wall the students repainted.
Neuman disputes misconceptions that employing people with disabilities costs more in providing on-the-job support, making physical accommodations and results in lower productivity.
“If you talk to organizations like Tim Hortons back east and Walgreens, they actually say it’s more profitable [to employee people with developmental disabilities] because it costs them $4,000 to turn over an employee, and they are five times more likely to stay on the job and they are very loyal, they love coming to work, they have a great attitude, they’re rarely sick,” she said.
“Derek was just telling me that he was at Winners today and one of the guys in the back of the house who was working with our students was saying, ‘Man, I wish my regular employees would follow my instructions like your kids.’ He’s like, ‘I tell them what to do, I get them instructions, and they follow it to the exact degree of what I tell them.’ He’s like, ‘If I could only get all the employees to do this, my life would be so much easier,’” she added.
With new restrictions on foreign works and a labour shortage expected in 10 years, Neuman says it’s a “win-win” to get more people with disabilities working.
McQuillen and Neuman have poured countless hours into their jobs, attending meetings with Community Living B.C., other community-based agencies and non-profits.
“I really believe in what we’re doing. I really believe that we’re looking at a population that could be marginalized and I want them to have full integration into our society and that they be able to participate and enjoy all of the great qualities of life that we all receive and that we’re a more equitable society,” McQuillen said. “I really believe in that passionately, and I see such incredible potential and opportunity for this population.”
Earlier on their last day, Tan mentioned she had an older sister who played tuba with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Martell ran upstairs and grabbed the part-time front desk clerk who had just nabbed his first tuba gig with the VSO. He knew Tan’s sister well.
“Although Lily’s quiet and she has a tougher time articulating what she wants to say, her body language spoke volumes. She had a connection with someone and they could actually have a real conversation about something that was important,” Martell said. “So as much as, yes, they learned some really cool skills that they could actually make money doing, they actually had the opportunity to have really, meaningful, valuable conversations, which as much as we take for granted 10 times a day we get to have, they might not even have one in a week.”
McQuillen says it’s not just these youth who benefit from such interactions.
“I’ve also seen how this population will come in and really infuse a much more positive and friendly work environment,” McQuillen said. “Because [these young people] are genuine and they’re authentic and they’re just fun to be around.”
As Martell thanked the pair for working so hard at the hotel, Zhou clapped and jumped up and down, and Tan bent her head and pressed her hands together as if in prayer.
crossi@vancourier.com
@Cheryl_Rossi
