Program Teaches Adult Students With Cognitive Difficulties to Become Educational Aides
By Susan DeFord
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 31, 2006
It's nearing 5 p.m. at La Petite Academy child-care center in Columbia, and Danielle Oliver is on her own with six 2-year-olds. A couple of boys are emptying bins of toys. A girl in blue jeans and a pink tutu chases her friend around the classroom. Another boy wants to go potty.
This is Oliver's dream job, the one she really wanted when she was stacking boxes in a Jessup warehouse and making beds at a Holiday Inn and mopping floors at fast-food restaurants.
"I wanted to work with kids all my life, and now I'm finally doing it," she said recently.
Oliver is a beneficiary of a Howard Community College child-care course that may be the first of its kind in Maryland. The course was specifically designed for people with cognitive developmental disabilities. Oliver, 32, has cerebral palsy.
Her speech is slow and sometimes difficult to understand. She walks with a halting gait because of rigidity on her right side. She has limited reading and writing abilities, a significant drawback in a field that increasingly emphasizes professional credentials for its workers.
Participants in the college's course do not have to be literate or have math skills or take a placement test. They do, however, need to demonstrate a desire to work with young children.
"People with disabilities want to work. They're loyal workers. They work best in a routine or a system," said Meredith Lowman, a disability specialist who helped create the 90-hour course. "We developed a class that teaches students how to be a really good aide in the classroom."
The course, first offered late last year, tries to address the dismal job prospects for people with disabilities. National labor statistics and surveys of working-age people with physical, cognitive or emotional disabilities reveal an unemployment rate that ranges from 65 to 75 percent.
"What's distressing is that the numbers [of people employed] have not significantly increased since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990," said Karen Flippo, chief executive of the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities in Alexandria. "There still is a misconception that people with disabilities can't work."
Advocates say many employers remain leery of bringing people with disabilities into the workplace. "Employers are afraid that they'll take on more than they can manage when they hire people with disabilities, that they won't know how to support them," said Sue Swenson, executive director of the Arc of the United States, an advocacy group with national headquarters in Silver Spring.
Howard Community College educators said they felt that child care, with its nurturing environment and emphasis on structured daily routines, offered good prospects for people with disabilities. But they also knew students would need custom-fit training and real work experience to win over prospective employers.
With little existing curricula to guide them, instructors devised their own, partnering with the county's Head Start preschool program. Instructors used dolls with floppy necks to teach the class's half-dozen students how to hold an infant and talk to a baby.
Students practiced story time, making up tales from picture books as they went along if they could not read the words. They learned how to clean a wound, how to change a diaper and warm a bottle, how to dress a child for the weather, what to do if a 2-year-old bites or a 3-year-old hits.
Students also had several weeks of observation and practice in Head Start classrooms so they could learn "in a way that's hands-on and literal," said Jena Smith, Head Start director for Howard's Community Action Council.
Oliver was the model student, rarely missing class even though she worked part-time early in the morning and late in the afternoon, assisting in a county-sponsored child-care program at an elementary school. After completing the course, she stopped by La Petite with a job coach from the Howard chapter of the Arc to help her fill out a job application.
"I was very impressed," said Kate Foster, director of the La Petite, who quickly hired Danielle for a full-time aide job. "She was very qualified."
Nearly all of Oliver's fellow students had job offers after they completed the course last winter. Three, including Oliver, now are working in child care, college officials said. If there is sufficient student interest, the college will hold the course again, starting in January.
Oliver's workday has her involved with several age groups. She cuddles and coos with babies, then assumes a more authoritative demeanor with preschoolers.
Her ease around children extends to their parents, and she jokes with them as they arrive to pick up their children. Foster and Oliver both said parents have not raised her disability as an issue. But the kids openly talk about it.
"They ask me, 'Why do I talk like this?' Sometimes I tell my story to them," Oliver said.
She was healthy when she was born in New Jersey in 1974. At 3 days old, the night before she was to go home from the hospital, she stopped breathing. The doctors revived Oliver, but the lack of oxygen to her brain caused significant trauma. She began having seizures, which continued through childhood and into adolescence.
Oliver's mother, Brenda, had her daughter begin years of physical, speech and occupational therapy as a toddler. Her firstborn daughter developed an upbeat resolve early on that helped her win supporters along the way. When she received a certificate of achievement in 1996 from Howard High School at the age of 21, her graduating classmates gave her a standing ovation.
Now that she is working full time at the job of her choice, Oliver has her sights set on another goal: moving out of her mother's home and into a place of her own, a step that the two have long debated.
"I am not going to give up on that," she said. "I know it's going to be a challenge. I know it's hard. I'm ready to take that step."
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