For most students with a disability, the transition to college is difficult. There are many more factors students with disabilities must take into account when making a commitment to attend a specific school.
For example, when I was looking at colleges to attend, I had to make sure I could receive assistance with my activities of daily living, particularly overnight. I eventually narrowed my options down to three schools; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, or the University of Wisconsin Whitewater. My senior year, I applied to these schools and unfortunately did not get accepted to any of them. Now my parents and I needed to figure out what to do; I would be done with my K-12 education, but they still needed to go to work and I needed somewhere to go and something to do during the work and school week.
White woman with long brown hair and purple glasses sits in a wheelchair outside. She is wearing a graduation cap and gown.
At this time, I had not graduated from high school. During my last IEP meeting, my high school’s director of special education was on maternity leave, so we were primarily dealing with the district’s head of special education. We expressed a fear of me having nothing to do or anywhere to go after graduation, and although spending time in my school’s transition program was an option, it was not a very good one. The program was intended for students with moderate to severe intellectual/developmental disabilities, and it was unlikely I would gain any useful skills in a program like that. Instead, my parents and I asked our district’s head of special education if it might be possible for us to create our own transition. She agreed, and I spent a year taking classes at our local career and technical education center while working on other transitional skills such as work experience.
After a minimally helpful year (the one-on-one aide I was assigned proved to be more of a hinderance than a help to my goals) and another rejection from UIUC, by sheer luck we learned about another program located in Chicago; the Illinois Center for Rehabilitation and Education – Roosevelt (ICRE). ICRE, according to their website, is “a residential school for students with severe physical disabilities and other health impairments”. I lived there for two years, coming home on weekends, which was my first experience being away from home for an extended period of time. While there, I took online classes through College of DuPage, my local community college, in order to increase my chances of getting into UIUC. I applied for the third time during my last year of ICRE and got accepted!
While my years of transition were not the smoothest that they could have been, I am grateful for the practice they gave me in advocating for myself and learning time management skills. Coming to college was still hard, don’t get me wrong, but the years of practice I had before I got here made it at least a little easier.
References:
About TCD / Information. (n.d.). Retrieved November 01, 2020, from https://www.tcdupage.org/domain/60
