Early Employment Lessons and Education

Dohn Hoyle, Partners in Policymaking Faculty Member, Activist and Organizer
16. Early Employment Lessons and Education
In the early '80s, we began efforts on employment. And efforts on employment, some people who worked for me, we were sort of the chair of the overall effort in our community on employment. We'd done organizing efforts and everything else to support employment in our community. People were doing that for grants.
This grant came along that said, "Can somebody do it for people with the most significant impairments?" That's always been to do it there, you can do it anywhere. I chaired the board that oversaw the efforts of all the other community. We were closing a workshop and day program and so on and so forth.
As we were doing those things, something became apparent to my staff first and then to me. That was that we had the people who were older did better in lots of stuff around employment. That the people who were a little bit older, did better in terms of job retention, did better in terms of relationships with co employees. Did better in terms of scores from their supervisors, et cetera, et cetera. And as we looked a little bit closer at that, we discovered that it was people who'd had no special education were doing better than those who had special education.
That was astounding to me. Turns out that our special education people had come from pretty segregated special ed. Some had come from special classes. Separate classes. But a number came from separate buildings and separate whatever. My board directors always encourage me to go find what I can find and do whatever we can do. One of the things we always did was bring Colleen in a lot so that we could learn some stuff.
So I began to look for better preparation for adult working life. I went to and heard some people from Canada talk about inclusive education. Now, Michigan has special education real early, which meant we were more likely to be segregated because that's what we had done before.