Project Search
Erin Riehle is the founder and director of Project SEARCH. This is a work program for high school students with intellectual and developmental disabilities to learn the job skills needed to carry over to the workplace.
Edited Transcript
MARSH NAIDOO:
Hello, and welcome to the Raising Kellan podcast. My name is Marsh Naidoo. I'm a physical therapist as well as a parent, raising Kellan, my 11-year-old son with cerebral palsy. I blog at www.raisingkellan.org, where we curate resources to empower and educate parents raising their children. This digital platform is a free resource and part of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit registered in the state of Tennessee. If you are a business or an individual who is interested in supporting our mission, hop over to the website, where you can see what sponsorship looks like.
As always, remember, the information on this podcast is presented as general education, and if you are seeking advice for a specific situation, to always contact a trained professional. It is just 60 days away, and we have our first ever live event coming up. This Disability Conference: Day at the Lake will be taking place on August 26th at Fyrne Lake in Dyersburg, Tennessee, where we have a robust list of speakers coming to present to us.
For more information and details. As far as speakers, please stay tuned for details, and we are proud to present that we have our first sponsor, Sherry Tidwell, a family nurse practitioner from Family Practice Clinic here in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Thank you so much for your legacy sponsorship of Day on the Lake. Without further ado, we are going to go ahead and jump into today's episode. So grab your cup of coffee, put your feet up, and get ready for some awesome conversation.
Today I'm joined by Erin Riehle from Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. Welcome to the podcast, Erin.
ERIN RIEHLE:
Thank you so much, Marsh. I'm excited to be here.
MARSH NAIDOO:
I'm excited to be talking with you. Guys, Erin is the founder and director of Project SEARCH. This is a work program for high school students with intellectual and developmental disabilities to learn the job skills needed to carry over to the workplace. This is a passion that's really close to my heart, Erin, as my son starts entering middle school and we look at what's in store for him in high school and beyond. So I'm really appreciative of this opportunity to be chatting with you this morning. Before we get into the meat and potatoes, so to speak, Erin, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what led to the formation of Project SEARCH?
ERIN RIEHLE:
Sure, Marsh. I am a nurse by profession, and my master's is actually in nursing administration. So I've worked in hospitals my whole life, and I've frequently been the director of a department or an area. I was the director of the nursing part of the emergency department at Cincinnati Children's. I was in that job for about 11 years. While I was there, I basically had my disability aha moment, I think. I'd never really thought too much about people with disabilities. I had never invited a person with a disability to my house for dinner. I've never gone to a movie with a person with a disability.
I think, if I'm honest, and I think honesty is required, in this moment if we're going to move past some of the limits we've put on people, but if I'm honest, and had you asked me when I was much younger what a person with a developmental disability could do for work, I would've told you, "I know they can wipe off tables, and I know they can bring in carts from the parking lot. I know they can bag groceries." But I think that for a long time that's all I thought they could do. Because everywhere you go in America, that's what you see people with developmental disabilities doing. I thought, "This can't be accidental."
When I was working in the emergency department as the head nurse, the director, I had a moment where I saw lots and lots of patients who were people with disabilities. I was struck by the fact that, as a children's hospital, we took care of them from birth to 21, and yet we never ever thought about what they were going to do as adults. Here we were, we were a huge hospital that hires lots of people, but we'd never ever intentionally hired a person with a disability. We have dozens of training programs. We train everybody. We train doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, we train child life therapists, OTs, PTs, you name it. We have training programs, and yet we never included people with developmental disabilities in any of our training programs.
I think what started, I just thought... I asked the question, "What do these young people grow up to do when they leave us, and why aren't they part of our workforce?" And I took it from there, and I was fortunate enough to know how to set up a program, to know how to ask questions, to do the research. I became very familiar with the agencies, the funding, and the process, and I had the full support of the hospital and my bosses, but I decided that we would start a training program. If we're going to train everybody else, we needed to have a program that allowed us to bring in high school students while they're in their last year of eligibility and teach them the skills that we needed within our hospital so they could go on to become our employees if they wanted, or if we didn't have an open position, we could at the very least give them skills that they could use to go out into the world and get a great job.
That is a long answer, I know. Sorry, Marsh.
MARSH NAIDOO:
No, that's perfect. That speaks a lot about some of the framework around the program. Erin, let me... And you correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that you bring the state agencies, the potential employers, and then the school system, and you have them collaborating. Is it, once the student graduates, do they go onto Project SEARCH for a year? Or is it actually while they are in school that they enroll in the program?
ERIN RIEHLE:
That is such a great question, and I already know it's going to be fun to talk to you. You know what I did? Because I was an administrator, I followed the money. It wasn't that hard. So I looked to see, while they are still in school, for high school students with disabilities, what services are they eligible for. What are the expectations of those services? What is the outcome supposed to be? And as a business, as a hospital, how could we partner with all of the groups that were supposed to be working on employment and transition? How could we bring them all together for a nine-month period and say, instead of all of us working separately and spending a boatload of money and having different definitions of success, how about if we all work together for one time period and really get these young people into a program where they can learn skills and go on to employment? So we actually have two programs to answer your question.
The program that's most common is a high school program. So we will go to a school district, and we will work with voc rehab, we will work with developmental disabilities, we will work with independent living, any state agencies that have anything to do with disability, we'll work with. If you've got a mobility training center nearby or a busing program, we'll ask all the partners to come together. We will say to the school, "If you have young people who are eligible for transition," which means they are going to perhaps spend an extra year or two or four learning transitioning to adult life and transitioning to employment, "we will work with young adults in high school who are in a transition program and we will be their final year of education." So for example, typically, the folks we serve have finished their senior year and now they are coming to us as a final year.
They're still technically in school, and they still have a teacher and a paraprofessional probably. But we're basically going to say, "You've finished your credits. You're not doing math, English, and science. We're going to take you for that extra year, your last year, and we're going to move into a business for nine months." And so a teacher is going to go with a class, maybe a paraprofessional, and then we're going to take usually eight to 12 students, but we call them interns, and for the entire school year, they're never going to set foot in the school. So for nine months, they're going to come from home to the business, they're going to stay there all day long, and then at the end of the day, they're going to go from the business back home. They're going to follow the dress code of the business. They're going to learn how to eat lunch in a business, how to use a locker room in a business. We're going to make them sit through orientation so they know what to do if they're bored or if they don't fully understand.
So for that nine-month period, the first three to four weeks are going to be an orientation to the business. After that, each intern is going to rotate through three different internships. Those internships are going to last about 10 weeks long. So each one of the young people will be in three different departments over that nine-month period, and they are there independently. So it's not as though we take Helen and say, "Helen, we're going to put you and eight other people in the cafeteria today for four hours, and here's what you're doing." That's not what we do.
For example, the day starts by coming to a classroom, and the teacher teaches an hour of curriculum, and that curriculum is on how to be a good employee. Are you dressed appropriately? How do you take feedback? How do you work as a team and take direction even when you don't like it? What is quality? What does that mean? So that hour of curriculum in the morning is focused on teaching young people how to be a good employee. Then each intern goes to a different department based on what they want to be when they grow up. So they are in that department for about five hours now. The teacher and the staff have gone in and learned the skills, and it's the teacher and the staff who are teaching the skills to the young person.
But for the most part, the intern is going to be in that department learning those skills, getting better and better at them, and we're going to continue to teach new things every day so that by the end of the 10 weeks, they know as many skills as possible. At the end of the day, they leave the classroom, and we spend about an hour talking about how did you do today. What did you learn? Did you have anything? Did anything upset you or bother you? Was anything hard? Were you dressed appropriately? Did you take feedback? So each day will look the same. It will start with an hour of curriculum, end with an hour of discussion and evaluation. In the five hours in between, the young person is in that department, learning skills.
So I'll give you a really quick example. We actually had a young woman, and she'd finished her senior year. She had stayed in school and was doing transition courses, and her dream was to work in a Hallmark store. That's all she wanted to do. She loved Hallmark. She went there as much as she could. She loved some of the figurines. She really wanted to work in a Hallmark store, but she had an obvious disability, and she'd applied several times and never even made it through the interview process. They didn't really want to interview her.
So finally, she and her parents decided to apply to Project SEARCH, and they came to the hospitals program. We're not a Hallmark store, but hospitals are a microcosm of the world. We are, and we can teach you anything that you need to know that will help you work in a Hallmark store. So her first internship, which was 10 weeks long, was in our storeroom. She learned how to take a large box, open it safely with a safety knife. She learned how to unpack the packages, put them on the right shelf. So she learned that process for receiving materials and putting them where they belonged. While she was in the storeroom, we taught her as many skills as we could. So she became familiar with that process.
In her second internship, she went to our pharmacy. In our pharmacy, we taught her how to check expiration dates, because that's important no matter what business you're working in. You can't have old, outdated supplies. We taught her how to front shelves, how to put the oldest supplies first, and the newest behind, keep shelves straightened and everything fronted. Those are really hard things to learn sometimes. I think checking expiration dates is one of the hardest things we teach. So she did that until she became much better at it. Then her final internship, her third internship, was in our gift shop, and we taught her how to do seasonal displays, how to do some basic order entry. We continued teaching her how to front shelves, how to make things look good, how to stock and supply.
At the end of the year, she graduated, and she applied for the Hallmark store in her neighborhood. The difference is we helped her apply, and we had three letters of recommendation from three different departments saying, "Listen, this young woman trained in our hospital. She learned these skills in each of these departments. She is a highly trained young person who's ready to do this job, and we recommend her for this type of work." And she went on to get a job at the Hallmark store, and she was ready for it. She'd been in our program seven hours a day for nine months. She built up the stamina. She knew how to dress, how to get herself there, how to be on time, how to take feedback. She still had to go through orientation and learn the skills at Hallmark, but she had the foundational learning that she needed to be successful. That's what we do.
MARSH NAIDOO:
I love it. Yes.
ERIN RIEHLE:
Yeah. We have lots of assessments and tools that we use to work with young people to figure out what is their dream, what is it they really want to do? Because we don't think that every person with a disability needs to work in just a few stereotypical jobs. Not that there's anything wrong with those jobs. They're great, but we want to make sure that the world, parents, and young people know that their options for employment are really large. There's many more options out there for people with disabilities, especially developmental disabilities, than you might imagine.
MARSH NAIDOO:
Erin. How easy is it to get buy-in from the workplace, like the employers? Just walk me through that. I'm just curious to see how you guys established those partnerships.
ERIN RIEHLE:
It's a great question, and I think in the early days of doing this, it was more difficult, and we had to spend a lot of time convincing business leaders that people with disabilities could learn skills and be among their best employees. Marsh, we used to get really stupid questions like, "Will my liability insurance go up?" And, "How many lawsuits have you had?" And sometimes, when you're not familiar with a group, the things that you think don't necessarily make sense, but everybody has to have their aha moment. I remember going to our lawyer at Cincinnati Children's and saying, "Are you worried about us hiring people with disabilities? Are you worried about increased liability?" And his name was Mel, and I will never forget it. He said, "Erin," he said, "a person with a disability couldn't possibly do anything that hasn't already been done by people without disabilities." And what I have learned over time is that's absolutely true.
The big difference, and this is my personal opinion, is that people with developmental disabilities aren't often very sneaky. So if they do something, you notice it right away, you see it, or they tell you. Whereas the rest of us, we know how to be really sneaky when we do the same things. But to answer your question, I think over time it's gotten surprisingly easier especially now when businesses need employees. But today, we have 730 programs in the United States and Canada, and each one of those programs is in a different large business. We now actually have businesses calling us and wanting the program because our program has very defined steps. We give you the curriculum, we give you all the tools, we help you get it set up. So businesses don't have to do it on their own. They're supported in this. They like a program, and It's evidence-based.
MARSH NAIDOO:
Yes.
ERIN RIEHLE:
I don't think the hurdle anymore is getting in the door to businesses. The difficult time, I think, can be working with individual managers or employees in departments, but I think that as long as you go in and you do education and you're clear that, "We don't teach jobs. That's not what we do." So we don't go into materials management and say, "We want to teach this job and then we want you to give us this job." That's scary to employees. We go in and we say, "How many different skills can we possibly teach in this department?"
We don't focus on a job. We focus on teaching as many skills as we can, and then we apply for any job that's open or available, and we get it competitively, just like everybody else. So we're not asking to go in and replace workers or to do work for free. That's not what we do. We are learners. We're in learning mode. After the program's over, our young people apply, and they usually apply within a business. I think businesses really like us. We are in hospitals, banks, military bases, manufacturing, pharmaceutical aviation. We're in airports all over the country, universities, government, it doesn't really matter. We have lots of programs, and I think businesses like structured programs.
MARSH NAIDOO:
You guys have a conference once a year where you'll bring together. Tell me about that conference, your annual conference, Erin. Tell me more about those things first.
ERIN RIEHLE:
Yeah, thanks for asking.
MARSH NAIDOO:
Yeah.
ERIN RIEHLE:
Yeah. So we have a conference somewhere in the United States every year. This year it's going to be the week of July 10th, and it's going to be in Milwaukee. We typically do the East Coast, middle West, and then we rotate. We usually limit it to about 800 people. We bring together educators, special ed directors, business people. We have a whole-day session just for business people who are interested in learning more about the program or just interested knowing how to include people with disabilities in their environment. We have VR counselors, DD counselors, we have parents, and we don't really market. We always fill up every year. I think we still have about 100 spots left, but we know it'll fill. We purposely keep our prices as low as we can because it's about learning and teaching, and we provide most of the meals during the week. We have evening activities.
I think we believe that people with developmental disabilities and intellectual disabilities are so amazing and so capable of doing great work that we need to do everything we can to help everybody else have their aha moment. We love the people who love working with people with disabilities. So we want to provide a great learning experience for them so they can come together for that week. If anyone would like to apply, you still can. It really is. We have people from all over the world come. We've had India, Israel, South America, Canada, UK, Portugal, Netherlands. Every year, we get more and more people who come internationally to learn in here. It's amazing, the Iceland, Italy. So if you have any listeners, we certainly would welcome them. It's a great conference.
MARSH NAIDOO:
Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for the initiative of putting this innovative program together and giving our kids a chance to enter the workplace and the workforce.
ERIN RIEHLE:
You know what, Marsh? We have young people. I guess they're older now. It's funny. We have people who've worked at Children's for 25 years. So they probably came to us when they were 20, and now they're almost 50 years old. They're critical employees. Even during COVID, they had to be on site because they were necessary. We have people sterilizing instruments and transporting patients, and we're talking critical roles because, I just will say this, and this is often a misunderstanding, but people with developmental disabilities can do really, really hard things. They can do complex work. It's what is more important than how hard something is, how routine it might be, or how systematic it might be. I think we make this mistake of thinking people with disabilities can only do easy things. That's not true. They can do crazy, difficult things.
So we have people with Down Syndrome who are sterilizing instruments used in our operating room, but sterilizing instruments is really hard. It's very hard, and it has steps, and you must do it in the same way, but once you learn that, it's the same over and over and over again. So it's hard, but there's an element to it that's routine. Businesses are full of these types of jobs, and oftentimes the people that we love and work with are our best candidates. So it's a win-win, and a big part of it is, my goal in life is just to help everybody have their aha moment when they sit up and they say, "Oh my gosh, this person can be a great employee, and their potential is off the chart." And so I appreciate the chance to talk to you. Thank you.
MARSH NAIDOO:
You as well, Erin. You have an amazing rest of your day.
ERIN RIEHLE:
You too. Thank you so much, Marsh.
MARSH NAIDOO:
Thank you for listening along on the podcast today. For more information about Project SEARCH, please check out projectsearch.us, and for a friendly reminder, remember that the day event we have coming up is just two months away, on the 26th of August, to be held at Fyrne Lake in Dyersburg, Tennessee. We are scheduled to start at 9:00 AM and will be finished around 3:00 PM-ish. We have received our first sponsorship, and that is Sherry Tidwell, a family nurse practitioner from Family Practice Clinic here in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Sherry, thank you so much for your sponsorship.
To keep posted on the event and other happenings, be sure to check out our Facebook page at Raising Kellan. If you all need to contact us for any reason, we can be contacted at raisingkellan@gmail.com. So without further ado, and as always, remember, guys, get to the top of your mountain. This is Marsh Naidoo signing off.
