Education does not come easy for everyone. While many Woodgrove students often complain about their performance on a recent test, there are some Woodgrove students who work everyday to gain the skills and knowledge they need just to one day be employed. These students are part of the transition program. The transition program is a branch of the special education department for ages 14-22 that specializes in preparing special education students for the workforce. Many transition students do not attend a college or university, which can be difficult in today’s society, so the program offers training to help students stay competitive in the job market once they leave high school.
On an average day for the students, they arrive at school before leaving for a job site at 10 a.m., where they work for two hours. These job sites include The Clothing Closet, Graffiti and Silk, a food pantry, or View of Heaven Farm. Then they take an hour lunch break before heading to a second job site for the day. This second site is either The Clothing Closet, The Dollar Tree, or Walgreens. The school partners with these businesses so the students can help out and learn different job skills like stocking shelves and reorganizing displays. Ms. Kelsey Wilson, the autism teacher at Woodgrove explains, “My favorite part is getting to see how excited they are when they get to go to their jobs. They love going, they all enjoy it. It helps me be able to see that we’re making an impact on what they love to do. We’re gaining that knowledge as to what they like and what they don’t like to help them get the job that they’re going to be successful at when they exit.” Of all the jobs, Ms. Wilson admits that Graffiti and Silk and The Dollar Tree are the students’ favorites, “I think they like it because they get to organize everything and they see how it looks like a disaster before and then they get to make it nice and clean and pretty.” These job sites are crucial to the students’ future success as they teach skills necessary for students to become employees.
Out of these work sites, there is one special place that stands out from the rest. View of Heaven Farm is located locally in Round Hill, Virginia, and is a fully functioning farm with very special employees. The farm offers, “year round employment to individuals in our neurodiverse and physically disabled community.” and their mission is to run a farm that, “provides meaningful employment to people of differing mental and physical abilities, pays a living wage, and grows food using environmentally sustainable processes.” Their products are located at several farm stores and markets around the area like the Spring House Farm Store and the Endless Summer Harvest Farm Market.
An ambitious worker, evident by her masters degree in special education, Ms. Wilson has clear goals for her program. In the short term, Ms. Wilson has several students she wants to graduate from the transition program to the more prestigious Community and Schools Together (CAST) program. You must apply to get in and only 50 students are admitted to the program each year. CAST students go to work sites more often and stay for longer periods of time. This helps them to quickly develop essential work experience. In the long term she would like to increase the number of sites students get to visit and increase the variety they can try. Currently, students have access to six work sites, but Ms. Wilson is working to increase that number to eight or nine, “just to give them more options and more things to do because a lot of what they’re doing is stocking shelves. Maybe something different like customer service would be a good one I’d love for them to try.” While these improvements may not sound that big or important to many people, they could lead to significant change and improvement in the lives of Woodgrove’s special education students.
