Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Life Styles admitted to UA
Adults with disabilities get to experience college life
FAYETTEVILLE — Bathed in sunlight as they step outside the student union at the University of Arkansas, a half-dozen young adults are heading to their afternoon class, backpacks strapped to their shoulders.
They’re not earning college credit, but these students are getting a taste of life on the Fayetteville campus.
They are enrolled in a program called Launch, a partnership between UA and Life Styles Inc., a Fayetteville nonprofit that serves adults with disabilities in Benton and Washington counties.
A division of Life Styles’ College for Living, Launch is designed for adults ages 18 to 25 with intellectual or developmental disabilities who are looking for a collegiate experience.
Launch students spend 20 hours a week on campus in classes that cover a variety of topics, some academic, such as math, reading and writing, and others that focus on skills for independent living, like budgeting, career choices and social interaction.
Working on a semester schedule, Launch coordinates with UA on a number of campus activities and privileges, such as library cards, student identification cards and pep rallies.
“They are on campus four days a week,” said Lindsay Broshears, who coordinates the program for Life Styles. “They ride Razorback Transit. They have university IDS. They work out at the [Health, Physical Education and Recreation building].
“They do everything socially that a typical college student would do.”
In addition, the students are paired with UA student mentors who volunteer to
spend at least two hours a week with each Launch student.
And Life Styles arranges unpaid on- campus internships for some Launch students. One student worked with the university’s track and field programs and another helped with the Razorback Marching Band, Broshears said.
Nineteen students are enrolled in Launch. Seven will be graduating from the program, and 12 are in their first or second year.
The inaugural Launch commencement ceremony is scheduled for 5: 30 p. m. May 8 in the auditorium of UA’S Graduation Education Building.
One of the graduates will be Chelsea Durham of Farmington, who spoke about the program Wednesday as Launch students ate lunch together in the Arkansas Union.
“I love it. It’s been a great experience for me,” said Durham, wearing a blue bow in her strawberry blonde hair.
Durham, 23, said her older brother went to UA so she was excited when she found out she would get to follow in his footsteps.
“I wanted to be like my brother,” she said.
The opportunity to be like older siblings who attended college is a familiar refrain from students who have enrolled in Launch, Broshears said.
Students in the program have been diagnosed with medical conditions such as Down syndrome, mild to moderate mental retardation, autism, epilepsy and cerebral palsy, Broshears said.
Students’ families pay $2,000 per semester for enrollment in Launch, Broshears said. Life Styles currently limits a maximum incoming class to 12, and five new students already have signed up for the fall semester, she said.
Life Styles and UA are working on a “memorandum of agreement” that will solidify the partnership and further define the roles and opportunities for the students, she said.
Those include auditing university classes or being able to pay for and attend UA sporting events as students. At UA, students who audit register for the class, pay tuition and fees and are graded, but they don’t receive degree credit.
The agreement should add a permanence to the relationship between Life Styles and UA, she said.
“We have plans to continue those from now until eternity,” she said.
The program draws students from around the state and some beyond its borders — one is from Houston.
Robert Edmonson, 21, has been in the program for two years.
“I like it. I like being a Razorback,” Edmonson said. “It’s a fun experience. It’s good to get a college experience, plus get ready for the future.”
‘ACCEPTING ENVIRONMENT’
Launch, which started in 2008, is a three-year program.
In the first year, students focus on social and independent living skills and have university students as mentors, according to Life Styles.
In the second, they are encouraged to practice these skills by moving into an apartment with staff support and internships.
By the third, Launch teachers focus on skills necessary for employment and in some cases, they help students get jobs.
It began at the behest of Sue Van Bebber, whose son Thomas was getting close to graduating from Springdale High School in 2008.
Her three other children were all going to be in college or in high school that fall, so she didn’t want Thomas, who had Down syndrome, to feel left out, she said.
Thomas was a Life Styles client, so Sue approached the organization with an idea that became Launch.
He will graduate from the program in May.
“The university has been great,” she said. “They were wonderful to him. We couldn’t have asked for anything better. It was truly a dream come true for our family and for Thomas.”
Desma Hurley, the lead teacher for Launch, said she tries to make the classes “as college-like as possible.” The students sometimes are all together in one class, but most of the time they are broken into two classes, depending on their ability level, Hurley said.
Hurley, who earned a master’s degree in human development from UA in 2009, will deliver a lecture and the students will take notes, she said.
“A lot of adults with developmental disabilities want to be as normal as possible,” Hurley said. “They want to do normal things. We want to provide those opportunities for them.”
The students are frequently seen traveling across campus to their classes. They are a midday fixture in the union, where they eat lunch and later meet with their UA mentors.
They use classrooms in different buildings when they come available, including in the Graduate Education Building, Peabody Hall and the Health, Physical Education and Recreation building.
With few exceptions, the students are always accompanied by a Life Styles teacher when they are on campus, Hurley said.
Broshears said there was a fear in the beginning that the students would be teased by UA students.
“We have not seen that at all,” she said. “A lot of the students who are local ... they see a lot of the people on campus that they grew up with. They give them high-fives. It’s been a great and super, super accepting environment.”
Tom Smith, dean of the College of Education and Health Professions, sits on the Life Styles board and became involved in the early discussions of how the program would work.
“Our primary role initially was to line up classroom space for them ... and we also tried to hook them up with [UA] students,” said Smith, whose expertise is the inclusion of students with disabilities into regular classrooms.
Since 1994, Smith has served as the executive director of the Division on Developmental Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children, a national, professional organization with more than 6,000 members.
“These folks are allowed to stay in public schools until they are 21. If you really believe in the philosophy of inclusion and normalization ... the logical place for them to be is on a college campus,” Smith said.
Cate Weir, a staff member at Think College, an initiative of the Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts Boston, estimates there are programs similar to Launch on 200 to 250 college campuses across the United States.
She said a movement started 15 to 20 years ago to provide young adults with intellectual disabilities a chance to enroll in higher education, or at least spend time on a college campus.
The catalysts were primarily the students’ families, she said.
“People, on a grassroots level, started asking for those opportunities,” said Weir, the project coordinator for the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research.
The programs spread slowly, she said. That changed in 2008 with the reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Opportunity Act.
For the first time since it was first passed in 1965, the new act mentioned students with intellectual disabilities and it established a definition for a comprehensive transition program for these students into college, Weir said.
Up to then, students with intellectual disabilities attending college were not eligible for federal financial aid because it was unlikely they would graduate, she said.
The act not only gave them a chance for that aid, but it established a federal funding source — the Transition Program for Students with Intellectual Disabilities.
Since then, 14 colleges and universities have met the federal funding standard and have received grants to start transition programs.
One of them is at California State University, Fresno, which received a $2.5 million grant to start Wayfinders last August.
Wayfinders enrolled 11 students for the 2011-12 school year, said Alice Witt, its executive director.
In Wayfinders, which is administrated by Cal State’s Kremen School of Education and Human Development, the students are enrolled in college-credit courses and live on campus, Witt said.
The students — ranging in age from 18 to 26 — are required to enroll in a minimum of six hours. They also have on-campus jobs.
“We really focus on integration and inclusion rather than segregating” the students, Witt said.
So far, the students have shown great strides, “really beyond our wildest imagination,” she said.
“It’s fantastic,” she said. “The students are given the dignity of risk, the dignity to make mistakes just like anybody else. There’s huge confidence gained. They are allowed to be doing what everybody else is doing.”
Jennifer Maynard, executive director at Life Styles, said she wants the program to grow into something similar.
“I would like to see expanded opportunities for our students, where they are getting educational opportunities,” Maynard said. “We would like for them to be able to audit classes. Housing would be fantastic.”
STUDENT MENTORS
Sarah Smith, a UA freshman from New Hampshire, spends eight hours a week as a mentor to four female Launch students: Becky Carter, Kakki Greene, Tala Samara and Hannah Stein.
She helps them with their homework, but most of the time they just hang out, watching movies, playing cards or going for ice cream, Smith said.
A swimmer, Smith is teaching stroke techniques to one of the students.
“It’s a friendship- type thing, more like a big sister,” said Smith, who is majoring in communication disorders and speech therapy, with a minor in social work. “I get so much joy from them. Even talking about them when I’m not with them, I have a huge smile on my face.”
Shane Mcfarlin, a sophomore biology major from Jonesboro, spends two hours a week as a mentor to Nick Amburgey.
“I thought that would be a cool way to volunteer,” McFarlin said. “Me and Nick ... will meet up somewhere on campus and we’ll either walk to Dickson [Street] and eat or do something else. Basically anything he wants to do, we’ll do.
“It’s just a time when he can have a friend to hang out with.”
Weir of Umass said there has been limited research into how students with intellectual disabilities are affected by their collegiate experiences.
“Some of our research has shown that students with intellectual disabilities who have any level of college participation ... they are more likely to be employed and have higher wages” than students with intellectual disabilities generally, she said.
“That’s promising,” she said. “But we’re just really getting started.”
To contact this reporter:
cbranam@arkansasonline.com