Disabled students head Strait to Work

Life after high school can be tough, especially if you’re a student with a disability who didn’t get the same education as their able-bodied peers.

In Port Hawkesbury, students with disabilities can go Strait to Work, a program that offers workplace experience and helps students become employable.

Strait to Work is a 10-month job-skills development program offered at the Nova Scotia Community College Strait Area campus. It is for students aged 18 and 21 who finished high school in the public system but followed a curriculum different from that of their peers.

“With their intellectual disabilities it is hard to get into what we call core programs, yet there was all kinds of indications that they would be successful in the workplace, especially when you look at entry-level positions in Nova Scotia where they’re crying for people,” says Raylene Bowman, transition coordinator for Strait to Work.

“It was sort of a marriage made in heaven.”

The first semester involves orientation and volunteering at an on-campus location. In the second semester, students do job shadowing off-campus. By third semester, students may be placed in paid positions. Bowman says the structure of the first semester is key to a student’s overall success.

“It is really nice because we can do a lot of the intervention and training where we identify that there is gaps or skill barriers we can address, before we send them out to employers where, technically, people are marketing themselves.”

Jill Johnson, a former student, gained experience volunteering at the college library and bookstore. She also volunteered at L’Arche, an organization for people with intellectual disabilities. Johnson also had placements at Homeward Inns of Canada and Dollarama.

She says she did many tasks at each placement, including customer service, handling money, stocking shelves, meal preparation and clean-up.  The program “helped with my relationship skills, independent skills and work skills,” Johnson says.

Strait to Work isn’t the first program for people with disabilities offered through NSCC, but it is different. Access to Community Education and Education, at the Akerley Campus in Dartmouth, has been operating for four years but its primary focus is developing independence and daily life skills.

Bowman says she received only positive feedback from community partners who took student interns, but the program can still be improved. She hopes to draw on the experiences of graduates when they return to share their experiences with students during alumni days.

“We want it to be their opportunity to come in and say, ‘I’ve been a graduate for two months, these are the realities, these are the things that have happened to me since graduating, this is what I have struggled with.’”

It’s an opportunity to “share with us what went well, where we could have increased resources, what we might be able to do for them now in terms of connecting them for more training,” Bowman says.

Rhonda Brown, a spokesperson for NSCC, says there are plans to develop programs like Strait to Work at the college’s Lunenburg and Annapolis Valley campuses.  

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