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Karen Golembeski: In your opinion, what are the top three things high schools can do to help prepare their students with learning disabilities for college?
Vincent Varassi: Well first off, it’s time for us to raise the bar and challenge the students. I spent 27 years in public education and one of the things that I saw happening too much and participated in to some extent, is in our desire to help the students and to “build their self-esteem,” we sometimes did not challenge them to be the extent to which they should have been challenged and to the extent to which they could succeed.
I believe these students can succeed with the proper support, with the right accommodations. And I believe that because I see them succeed every time at Fairleigh Dickenson. I see these wonderful students with learning disabilities coming in and taking course work and studying hard and being successful. And I see many of them going onto graduate school.
So I would say one of the first things that high schools can do is start to challenge them while they still have them in high school and see what they do with the challenge. It’s just information. If a student can handle a more challenging curriculum, that’s information that tells us the level of challenge that the student will be able to handle at college.
If the student is not able to handle that level of challenge, that’s also information and may direct us in a different direction for what that student should be considering for his post-secondary experience. So that would be to me first of the three things: Raise the bar.
The second thing I think schools really need to be able to do is to help students understand the nature of their learning disability. Now, at this time in their lives, in adolescence, what they really want is to be exactly like every other kid. [But] it’s really the time for them to start understanding how they are different and how their learning style and learning disabilities [impact them].
The word disability, by the way, is something they have to start getting comfortable with because it is a legal term and they’ll need to be comfortable with it when they get to college. So whatever we’re calling their issues in high school, whether it’s a “learning style difference” or some other euphemism, they need to know that the legal word is “disability” and to get comfortable with that.
When I meet kids at an interview in my university, I ask them to tell me a little bit about their learning disability and how it affects them in school. And I have to tell you, 90% of the kids I meet can’t answer that question. If they don’t know where they have trouble and why they have trouble, how can we expect them to take the next step which is to advocate for themselves? The student disability services staff [can’t help them] if they don’t know what they need, if they don’t know how they learn.
How are they going to explain their learning disability and what the documentation says if it’s really never been explained to them? So we have to challenge, raise the bar, give them a real college prep level of experience so that their first experience writing the long paper isn’t when they’re living 500 miles away from home on some campus where they don’t have the support network that they had for four years.
Give them that experience ahead of time. Make sure they really understand their learning disabilities. And, I would say, let’s make sure that we believe in them and let them know that we believe in them. Make sure they understand their gifts. Make sure they understand their strengths and guide them to areas that play into their strengths.
Karen Golembeski: Thank you. In conclusion, you mentioned several times that students need to come to college prepared to be self-advocates, knowing how to explain their learning disability, their gifts, their strengths, and how their disability impacts them in school. Do you have any final advice for how high school students can start preparing themselves to be self-advocates while in college?
Vincent Varassi: It’s important for high schools to prepare students to self-advocate. And I do have a couple of ideas on how they can start doing that.
The last school district where I worked had a program in study strategies. In the upper level of that study strategies curriculum, there was a lesson on preparing kids to transition to college. And one of the teachers in that district came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. In the spring of junior year, the students became responsible for writing the front part to their IEPs. Each student had to write an essay which would [later] become the Present Levels of Educational Performance section in his IEP.
And you look at me and ask, “How are they going to do that?” Well, what this teacher did was to meet with each student and construct with the student a carefully structured interview. Next students had to make an appointment to interview their case manager. During that interview, they would ask the case manager to explain to them what all that stuff was in their file. What was all that testing about that I took? What does it show that my strengths are? What does it show that my talents are? What does it show that I’m really kind of weak at and will have trouble with?
The interview was structured and the kids took notes or record it. Then they would move from the case manager to the guidance counselor where they would ask similar questions. Guidance counselors tend to have even more current information than the people on the team because the guidance counselors are there every day. Their offices are more accessible to teachers. So the counselor may have some day-to-day feedback to offer students about, for example, “What Mrs. Jones is thinking about their work in mathematics or social studies.”
Next the student would go interview that teacher and ask the same questions. And then they have to interview two teachers and ask the teachers they thought were the student’s strengths, what they were doing well in class, and what some of teacher’s concerns were. What were some things that teachers thought they might be able to do better? What are some accommodations that they might need that maybe they weren’t receiving but the teachers (through their informal observation of the student on a day to day basis) thought might serve them well?
Now the students have this tremendous amount of data which they took back to their study skills class. Working together [and using the data collected], they would start to construct the essay that became the front piece to the IEP. Then, to take this idea of self-advocacy a step further, each of those students conducted the first part of their IEP meeting. And they came dressed in shirts and ties, or dresses. Those IEP meetings were just wonderful experiences. You could see that the student was a half-inch taller than he’d been just the morning before because he came in and was excited about what he was going to do. In many cases, their parents were just floored by the fact that here was their kid explaining to the room [full of adults] things that sometimes the parent themselves didn’t understand.
We’ve all been at those IEP meetings where the jargon starts flying and the explanations of the disabilities are traveling around and sometimes it can be lost on someone who doesn’t do this for a living every single day. And so a parent might watch their own kid explaining information that maybe they didn’t quite understand. Sometimes I saw why people were asked to participate where a parent found their son or daughter explaining to them stuff the parent have been trying to hide from them from the first 16 years of the kid’s life. And there was their son or daughter conducting that IEP meeting and explaining about [their learning disability] to the [IEP team]. And parents saw that, “Wow, they’re okay with it.” That is one of the most empowering exercises that we can offer students so that they can take their experience to college and continue to become advocates for themselves.
Karen Golembeski: Vincent, thank you for giving us so much of your time today.
This transcription was made possible by a grant from the American Legion Child Welfare Foundation.
