Several hours a week, high school students in special education programs in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD) help out at local businesses as part of the state-funded WorkAbilityI program.
Through the program, The California Department of Education provides grants to subsidize the wages of these students to work at local businesses with the aim of helping them develop valuable skills and gain experience.
"I typically explain the program as a partnership opportunity with local businesses and our students in special programs to provide work experience for students who are marginalized or underserved, frequently don’t have the skills yet to get a direct hire position, but they’re able to get experience through the grant at no cost to the business," said Kelly Keith, the WorkAbilityI specialist for SMMUSD who coordinates the program in the district.
The WorkAbilityI program grant also provides funding for para educators and other district employees to act as job coaches and accompany students at their work placements. However, Keith emphasized that their role is to support and guide the students, not to perform the work themselves.
"The point and intent of work experience is to foster independence, so the job coach is there to redirect the student and oversee quality control of the task," she said. "It’s not to complete any portion of the job."
Keith has been involved in the program for nearly 20 years and said she has placed students at many Santa Monica businesses including TJ Maxx, Animal Kingdom, El Cholo, Geoffrey’s Hi De Ho Comics and Beadah among others.
"We strive to place students that are complementary to the business’s needs," she said. "So we try to pair a student’s strengths to business needs and accomplish tasks that are productive and useful for them so that it alleviates some of their workload and teaches students specific skills that they could generalize in the workplace, in their future at another site or similar business."
Keith said the program is not only mutually beneficial for the businesses and students in many ways, but also contributes to an overall greater sense of community and breaks down stigmas.
"Community engagement and positive interactions with students make people feel good," she said. "It’s seeing people as fellow humans and not others with disabilities."
The ultimate goal of the program, Keith said, is to set students up to find employment in the future. In some cases her students have gone on to be directly hired by the businesses where they were placed during the program.
"That is the goal – that these successful experiences will eventually lead to competitive, integrated employment," she said.
Keith said she is always looking for new businesses to partner with and those interested can contact her at kkeith@smmusd.org.
For more information about the WorkAbilityI program visit: https://www.smmusd.org/Page/4212
