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The students in Foothill College’s Tools for Transition and Work program started off cleaning tables and organizing classrooms in the STEM center as part of an internship program.
But when Konstantin Kalaitzidis, program coordinator for the Los Altos Hills college’s STEM center, saw the students peering at the school’s robots through a window, he waved them over.
Soon they were constructing their own robots.
“It’s almost as if they got in a rocketship, left the universe and came back,” Kalaitzidis said. “I’ve never seen students focus as much as them.”
Tools for Transition and Work, Foothill’s yearlong certificate program for students with disabilities, aims to give students tools to pave their own paths, whether it be toward robotics careers, university or a job in their community.
The program accepts around 20 students a year who take five curated classes per quarter like Basic English Skills, Disability and the Law, Current Events and Public Transit Safety. Throughout the program, students also participate in an internship, sit-in on career speeches and take personality quizzes to map their strengths.
While classes are built to be as flexible as possible, they’re not so different from other college courses.
“We do not make the curriculum simpler to make it more accessible.” said lead instructor for the program Ben Kaupp. “We help the students achieve what they can within a real curriculum that has all of the same rigor at the local and state level.”
Kaupp, who teaches the majority of the courses in the program, said keeping a focused curriculum can cause “incredible success.”
Oftentimes people with disabilities are stereotyped to work in lower-paying jobs like at grocery stores, said adjunct professor Madeline Anderson, but the program can change the trajectory of students’ lives.
“It’s too often that we see young people with disabilities not having any opportunities for upward mobility,” she said.
Students in the program have gone on to attend Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, culinary school and to work in animation, to name just a few, which Anderson attributed to the wide variety of internship opportunities included in the program – like one that allows students to take photos alongside Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists.
Along with the STEM internship, students worked to create a STEM career course around two years ago. The course, which will go into play this year, offers even more opportunities to learn about the industry, whether it be in coding or robotics.
Still, success looks different for everyone, Kaupp said, and the program is meant to expand students’ perception of success.
“One of my favorite student stories is not moving forward, but backwards,” he said. “He got a certificate of completion for high school and will now be going back to get his GED.”
The program, because it’s so rare, is not able to accept all applications, Kaupp said. Unfortunately, accessible programs like this one often cost thousands.
“The closest program to ours is $65,000 more, ours being roughly $100,” Kaupp said.
Following a state and the college’s own policy, first-time full-time students are eligible for two years of free school.
The college hopes to expand the Tools for Transition and Work program in the future to provide the accessible curriculum to more students across the Bay Area, but Kaupp said the school doesn’t currently have the funding.
“It’s a model that can be duplicated nationally, and it challenges limitations placed on neurodiverse students,” said Simon Pennington, associate vice president at Foothill.
Above all else, Kaupp wants people to know that there is no such thing as normal – his students simply have a label placed on their differences.
“Everyone has a unique perspective of the world, a unique way of interpreting the world – some of us just happen to be diagnosable,” he said. “But that has nothing to do with intellect, ability or potential.”