Vocational Program

Vocational Program Overview

Our Prevocational Program involves a multi-disciplinary team approach including teachers, job coaches and our communication and occupational therapy departments.  Our vocational areas include: food service, clerical skills, maintenance, retail, packaging and assembly tasks.

All of our Middle and Upper School students receive pre-vocational services.  The focus of our program is to help our students develop their identities as workers.  Workers communicate with their coworkers and supervisors, have a good attitude, make good decisions, ask for help when needed, solve work-related problems and learn skills specific to the job or task at hand.  Specifically, we want our students to be able to greet their coworkers, have short, polite conversations, ask for work, ask for more work if they finish what they have been assigned, say goodbye and be able to reflect on their work.

At the Middle School level, students begin to attend classes weekly in the Work Skills Center.  This is an opportunity for students to try a variety of work experiences within the school community.  It is also an opportunity to develop skills and areas of interest.  We use this time to evaluate work performance and begin to think about what future work experiences might benefit a particular student.  Some of these tasks include: sorting, inventory, assembly, packaging, clerical tasks, delivery, retail, maintenance and basic food service.

In the Upper School, all students participate in a variety of work experience. Students and their families are surveyed each year to collect information on areas of interest.  Students continue to work as a group as they do in Middle School, but they also add a more individualized in-house job experience.  These are designed to meet a student’s specific vocational goals and assist them in the progressions of their vocational readiness.  School-based work experiences take place on campus and can be with other classrooms, school administrators, administrative assistance, maintenance jobs or working with specialists.

In the area of Project Based Learning, we have several electives.  We have Dinners-2-Go (Ordering and Packaging Ingredients to Deliver for Meals Ready to Cook), Horticulture (Growing and Caring for Plants, Arranging Flowers), Industrial Arts Workshop (woodworking projects designed for retail sale), Jewelry Box(Designing and Creating Earrings, Bracelets, and Necklaces), Wake-Up-Call Breakfast (Serving Students and Staff Breakfast), Project Linus (Making Blankets to Support those in Need), Waypoint Adventure (clerical and organizational tasks for Waypoint Adventure which offers adapted, customized outdoor adventures for all).