Work starts Thursday...and I'm thinking of my co-workers, not the students.
- "Got a full 6 pack, but lacks the plastic thing to hold it all together."
- "He doesn't have ulcers, but he's a carrier."
- "He would argue with a signpost." (OK, this one's a student)
- "A photographic memory but with the lens cover glued on." (OK, this one's me...it sounds like one I may have to use)
- "If you see two people talking and one looks bored, he's the other one." (and I'm thinking of one person in particular)
Bradford M Kleemann
What do you do, exactly?
MzEllen
Post authorI do job training for mentally impaired post-high school adults. (age 18-26)
The people I work with are both wonderful and...well..weird.
Bradford M Kleemann
We employ such people as janitors, but some have job coaches right along side of them. What sort of things do you train them to do?
MzEllen
Post authorWe do such a wide variety of things...We have 6 campus classrooms and 7 community classrooms.
Students typically start on campus and as they mature will move out into the community (or if they are cognitively lower they may never move up). These students mostly stay back at school and do piece work that comes in from Hope Network that involves different sorts of packaging.
The community rooms work in grocery stores, departments stores, churches, schools cafeterias, hospitals, charity stores and factories, restaurants. We do collating and packaging for offices and hospitals. We have a lot of students that work for area grocery stores - greeters, stockers, the kids that collect the grocery carts. One of my students put fruit on the styrofoam and shrink-wrapped it. I've gone with students to restaurants where they weight out meat and put it in bags to freeze so that the cooks just have to grab the bag when they're cooking.
One of our campus classroom maintains a nature trail that is wheelchair accessible, another one "grows compost" that is used all over campus (we have 3 schools and 100 wooded acres on our campus).
We do a lot of volunteer work - our city hosts one of the largest marathon runs in the country every spring and we put together the participant packages - 14,000 of them.
We collate and sort mailings for charity organizations - "Forgotten Man Ministries" is a big one.
Whew...long comment...but you get the idea...if we have a student that is capable of doing more, our job is to find a placement that is suitable for that student, so we are constantly looking for new jobs and new companies to get students to work at.
Of course right now (we have one of the highest unemployment rates in the country) paid jobs are few and far between. Even our most regular paid job on campus is dry because they supply the auto companies.
anyway...I love my job and the people I work with.