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From
The Kansas City Star:
Ask Mary Warm (pictured) about her hope for her future, and she cocks her head. The bushy ponytail swings, the smile spreads across her face.
“I love kids, being around kids and hanging out with them, so I want to be a teacher,” said Warm, 18, a junior at Archbishop O’Hara High School in Kansas City.
For most teens Warm’s age, her goal is fairly easily reached with good grades in high school and four years of hard work in college. But for Warm, who has Down syndrome, a chromosomal disorder resulting in cognitive disabilities, it’s not as easy.
But the University of Central Missouri’s THRIVE program, which starts this fall, could well be a big step toward making it easier after she graduates from O’Hara.
“We’d say you will go to school,” said her mother, Julie Warm, “you will get a job.”
But her parents never expected that Mary might attend a typical four-year institution, live in a campus dormitory, and attend classes with more typical college students.
Not, that is, until they learned of UCM’s two-year residential Transformation, Health, Responsibility, Independence, Vocation, Education program for young adults with Down syndrome, autism and other developmental issues (go to www.ucmo.edu/thrive).
Students who qualify for THRIVE will live in the Warrensburg school’s dorms with traditional students and attend classes to enhance job skills and offer them new-found independence, said Joyce Downing, associate dean of UCM’s College of Education.
Some students, depending on ability, may stay on to earn a degree.
Funded by a grant of nearly $500,000 from Kansas City-based, nonprofit EXCEL, it is designed for students such as Warm who, once they have graduated from high school, work toward full inclusion in the workplace and society.
Mary Warm is volunteering this summer at a Kansas City YMCA and at the Children’s Center for the Visually Impaired, where she helps with preschoolers. Some days she works as a mother’s helper for a family friend.
“I do the laundry, too,” she said. Warm admitted it was not her favorite thing, but “it’s part of the job, and I work hard all the time.”
It is good practice, she said, for when she goes to college.
“I don’t know which college I’ll go to, but my parents will work it out,” she said.
UCM’s THRIVE program will admit only 10 to 12 students a year. They will be screened by education professionals.
Parents of such students formed EXCEL in hopes of starting a college program in the Kansas City area for their children and others like them.
“Our goal is to provide THRIVE students with an opportunity to succeed beyond high school graduation,” Downing said. “The certificate of completion THRIVE students receive at the end of their two years on campus will be an indication of their ability to adapt to new learning and living situations while expanding their academic successes.”
THRIVE curriculum is tailored to individuals.
“A campus like UCM is fantastic for these kids because UCM is a typical college full of typical kids going to football games and hanging out, and these kids will have the opportunity to have a typical college experience, too,” said Randa Niederhauser of Kansas City.
She has a daughter with Down syndrome who benefited from a similar program in Roswell, N.M., and now works and lives on her own.
The independent-living skills gained at college are “vital,” she said.
“Kids come out of special education and are not qualified for any kind of competitive employment,” Niederhauser said. “We say, ‘Go into a sheltered workshop and learn a skill,’ but too many of these kids never come out of the sheltered workshop.”
The UCM program, at a cost of $16,700 for two semesters, including room and board, is a first for Missouri. Kansas does not have anything like it.
Marcia Soltz’s son Greg graduated from the Roswell school two years ago and now lives on his own in Mission and works in a Mexican restaurant kitchen.
During the two-year program, he lived in a dorm and learned to take public transportation.
Greg Soltz, who has a form of palsy and slurred speech from a brain hemorrhage at birth, took life courses and studied food service.
“He struggled enough going to high school; college was the furthest thing from our minds,” Marcia Soltz recalled.
But when a younger brother started planning for college, Greg got the notion he would, too.
“There was nothing around here,” Marcia Soltz said. “Everything was so far away and the thought of him going off so far was scary. I think for him, too.”
Had there been a program in Missouri or Kansas, she might have worried less. As it turned out, she said, “Greg loved it and he did very well there.”
He came home, “grown up, more confident and independent. He made the first real friends of his life there.”
Making friends is something Warm said she was pretty good at, too. If she gets in the THRIVE program, she expects “to make many more friends.”
“It’s like when you start a new school as a freshman. It’s scary at first and hard to make friends. … I try to make sure they understand that I have Down syndrome and I’m slower. I want them to know me.”
Warm’s parents also would like to see her selected for THRIVE.
“We never limit her,” said her father, David Warm. “She is always surprising us. We don’t know what the possibilities are for her. We just follow her lead.”
From The Kansas City Star:
