1. Title:The National Disability Policy: A Progress Report, December 2001 - December 2002- Youth
2. Author: National Council on Disability, http://www.ncd.gov/ (KACW 9/19/03)
3. Kathy’s Note: The National Council on Disability’s progress report is a 125 page document, covering a variety of issues, such a Civil Rights, Education, Health Care, Long-Term Services and Supports, Youth, Employment, Welfare Reform, Housing, Assistive Technology and Telecommunications, Transportation, and International Issues and Homeland Security. After much thought, I have decided to prepare a report on the broad issues and prepare a report on each of the above issues
4. Transition: Although effective transition has been frustratingly elusive for many years, this year the simultaneous reauthorization of IDEA and the Federal Rehabilitation Act creates the unique opportunity to incorporate the identical transition language in each law. Although not officially involved in the process under any law, other major entities have become progressively more concerned with transition. Transition bears upon the Medicaid program in connection with the role Medicaid or other insurance should play as a source of funding for AT required in the educational setting (and that relationship will no doubt be further refined in the IDEA reauthorization). Many youth with disabilities are delegated to the benefit rolls because of inadequate systems for transitioning into higher education or self-supporting adult activities.
5. Accountability for Results: New mechanisms must reward, assist and, where necessary, sanction both educators and rehabilitation providers, leaving them to decide how to share responsibility and create effective and cooperative programs. Although VR and special education are overseen by the same cabinet department (Department of Education), the interactions at state and local level suggest that the agencies are very different. New laws must provide means for regularly gathering and incorporating student input into the design of transition programs at the local and state levels. It is assumed that "accountability for results" will be incorporated into the Workforce Investment Act of 1988 (WIA) reauthorization as it will be incorporated into IDEA. Outcome criteria must relate to the postsecondary school placement and outcomes that students achieve. Unlike other activities where accountability rests with individual schools or school districts, evaluation of transition outcomes is complicated by the involvement of two separate service systems. Only by making educators and rehabilitation providers equally and jointly responsible for the success or failure of transition can accountability be achieved. (Please see more in the education paper)
6. Youth Preparing for Tomorrow: The Social Security Administration (SSA) sponsored a nationwide series of Youth Preparing for Tomorrow conferences in late 2001. These conferences yielded new insight about what youth, family members and others knew about the transition process. These meetings discovered that people needed more than just the services and resources of the special education and vocational rehabilitation (VR) systems are implicated in successfully negotiating the passage from school to adult life. They need adequate health services, predictable income supports and access to AT, transportation and mainstream educational and labor market resources. The National Youth Leadership Network also conducted a survey with youth with disabilities. Youth were asked to rank the importance of various issues-health services, knowledge about reasonable accommodations and reliable transportation were among the top seven. The top choices were not strictly academic, but instead dealt with these and other services, with self-assertion and self-advocacy techniques and skills and with similar competencies not traditionally included in classroom education. While the reauthorized vocational rehabilitation (VR) and IDEA laws must deal clearly with transition, they are not the only two programs involved with the issue.
7. National Youth Leadership Network:The National Youth Leadership Network (NYLN) is a five-agency-supported effort aimed at involving youth in formulating and evaluating the programs and services that affect their lives and through its leadership training component is aimed at developing the next generation of leadership in the disability community. The four line agencies include: the Department of Education, Department of Labor, HHS, the SSA and the NCD. In the “Areas of Quality Improvement” in its 2002 annual report, the NYLN identified two concerns related to the leadership conference. They were:
• The need for small-group discussion time, where participants would give input on national issues, with national leaders as mentors and facilitators.
• The need for conference, supplied personal assistants who are knowledgeable about how to provide youth-directed support.
8. Youth Councils: The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) created local youth councils to work with local workforce development boards. The labor market environment places a greater premium on job selection, technological knowledge, self-presentation skills, transportation, flexibility, resilience and other individual and environmental variables than any labor market before it. Under these circumstances, the experiences and insights of youth, both those who have been successful and those in the process, are needed to make and validate local workforce development policy.
9. Recommendations:
• The Administration make certain Youth Councils are being used to their fullest potential
• The Administration clarify its support for the NYLN and explore its fullest empowerment and most effective utilization.
• The Administration find ways, beyond intergovernmental review processes, for involving youth with disabilities in the development and evaluation of policy and program initiatives, especially the important initiatives coming out of the New Freedom Initiative
• Congress seek testimony from young workers on how programs affecting them can be most usefully provided.
• Cross-budgeting experiments are used where transition services would be funded by grants or appropriations to education-rehabilitation partnerships
• The Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) inquire systematically into the operation, integration and impact of the youth advisory councils, and make suggestions to continue and improve the WIA reauthorization this year.
• Discretionary grants be made on a trial basis to education - rehabilitation agency partnerships for transitional services, with success or failure and the availability of further funds to be contingent on the development and achievement of unified transition goals and without any opportunity for accountability being differentiated between them.

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