Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series on special needs education in the Issaquah School District. Read the first part on district’s special needs preschool online.

Perhaps the hardest part of Megan Boss’ new internship at Cafe 1910 is wringing the towels. Her hands, buried beneath oversized rubber gloves, struggle to coordinate the movement.

Boss, who has William’s syndrome, dreams of someday busing tables at Red Robin. And so the 21-year-old has been practicing with the towels on weekends.

No matter how simple the task, work provides purpose in life, and students like Boss deserve the same opportunity to find that self worth, said Diana Gay, head of the Issaquah School District’s Academy for Community Transition.

For Boss, leaving public school means leaving a safety net that has directed most of her life. ACT, which serves students with the most severe disabilities, has helped her build the skills she needs to transition into the community.

Graduation is dictated by age and Boss will leave the ACT program in a few months. But unlike the diplomas of high school ceremonies, she’s earned a resume proving that she can restock sugar, wipe tables and greet guests.

ACT prepared her for independence, life without a classroom, or as she explained, “to always like this new place called life school.”

For 23 years now ISD has been giving students like Boss an opportunity to transcend her disability and join the ranks of working citizens. For the students, there couldn’t be a greater gift than the opportunity to be an ordinary member of the community.

Building a resume

At a grocery store, four students lean in around a carton of eggs nesting in Wendy Hennig’s hands. Fingering through the box, she explains how to check for broken ones.

Her pupils, some whom have Down syndrome, ponder on her words a minute, before herding the grocery cart toward the milk aisle.

Together they find all the ingredients to make French toast, part of a cooking unit. But the most important lessons for the students come by being out in the community.

Hennig makes sure they’re mindful of cars in the parking lot, teaches them to be courteous to other customers and shows them how to navigate the store.

The goal isn’t to just to make the students comfortable in the community but the community comfortable with them, Gay said. “We definitely need the non-disabled population to embrace our people as functioning normal folks.”

By the end of the year, grocery store trips will elevate to jaunts into Seattle. While community skills are perhaps the most fun for students – especially when they learn to order their own cheeseburgers – the heart of the program is its internships.

In the ACT classroom at Tiger Mountain High School, Boss presses her fingers into the pages of her binder, a resume of sorts, and hums through the catalog of experiences: wiping tables, restocking shelves and riding a bus.

Her resume makes her more interesting to employers, Gay said.

All of her students work internships three days a week. What differentiates them is how much assistance they receive, she said.

Hennig, a career specialist who once did sales, focuses her time on pitching her students to local businesses. They may not find work through the pitches, which is King County’s responsibility, but they will get training. As a result, about 75 percent of ACT graduates will go on to work at least part-time jobs.

As Hennig drove the school’s van, she shouted over her shoulder, “You guys are all going to have jobs when you leave here, right?”

Stephan Daghofer’s eyes lit up, “Yea!” he shouted with clapping.

“I figure what I’m now ‘selling’ is these wonderful students,” she said.

A wave of research

Gay was working in Arizona as a special education high school teacher when she saw a jobs posting for what would become ACT.

The new program was groundbreaking, she said. “We were actually encouraged to think of our students as individuals who could work in the community on their own.”

Before ACT, students often hung around high school classes until they turned 21. Gay started with six students and one educational assistant. The program is now four times that size.

ACT came on the front wave of research that started in the 1970s. By the ‘80s, graduate students from the University of Oregon were proving that not only could people with disabilities learn, but that paid work would give them a higher sense of self worth.

Issaquah started its program four years before it was mandated by law.

Work programs, called sheltered workshops, were already in place when the research came out. Gay even took a job at one when she first graduated from Western Washington University.

“I wanted to be a helper,” Gay said. “They had such great potential, and it was fun to help them realize that.”

However, the sheltered workshops weren’t enough. They didn’t allow people with disabilities to be out in the community, and it paid pennies for their labor, she said.

The ACT program didn’t just challenge how teachers thought about their students, but how Issaquah thought about those with disabilities.

“The community wasn’t ready for them,” Gay said.

The public schools had just started integrating people with disabilities into the regular classes. Many adults had never seen someone with Down syndrome before.

“They had to be shown what our folks were capable of,” she said.

Once the barriers started coming down, Issaquah turned out to be an accepting community. The work has paid off, she said.

“It’s just fabulous to run into someone you graduated 8 years ago, and they’re still working at the job they had when they left school.”

Megan Boss, who has Williams syndrome, clears tables at Cafe 1910 at Swedish Hospital. The internship is helping her build the skills she’ll need to find paid work. BY CELESTE GRACEY

Using a shopping list that has both pictures and words, Kevin McCarthy finds milk at a grocery store as a part of a community skills unit in the Academy for Community Transition. BY CELESTE GRACEY