High Praise for High School/High
Tech
In the early '80s, a task force of high-tech executives met to discuss how to recruit the skilled employees they needed to stay competitive in the global marketplace. They knew recruiting for high-tech jobs was a priority. They also knew that people with disabilities were a dependable and productive pool of potential employees. But what they unfortunately discovered was that few people with disabilities had the education and training to qualify for high-tech jobs. And so the seeds were planted for High School/High Tech (HS/HT).
Today in Georgia and elsewhere, HS/HT is recognized as a powerful community collaborative of parents, educators, rehab professionals and business people. Its goal is to get to students with disabilities early, expose them to math, science, and computers and encourage them to envision these fields as exciting and viable career paths.
On a parallel path, HS/HT also aims to help professionals in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology-related fields better understand the uses of assistive technology and the accommodations and facility-access needs of persons with disabilities, so that as employers they can envision a potential new source of able, enthusiastic and well-educated employees.
The Georgia HS/HT program has been extraordinarily successful. Pilot efforts in 1997 were led by Annette Bowling, executive director of the Albany Advocacy Resource Center, and Lee Miller, then Georgia's delegate to the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities. Projects in Columbus and Albany set the gold standard for replication, culminating in work with NASA, an earlier financial backer.
The Albany students studied natural butterfly metamorphoses for two years and developed an experiment to determine if caterpillars would develop into butterflies in the absence of gravity. The experiment was flown on board Columbia Space Shuttle STS-93 Mission on July 1999, with Col. Eileen Collins, the first female commander. The successful results of that space exploration led to a permanent exhibit in the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, featuring the first Painted Lady butterflies ever to emerge in zero gravity.
Today there are some two-dozen HS/HT programs in Georgia schools, and the recent $250,000 grant from the USDOL Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) will pave the way for more. The initiative will focus on necessary infrastructure and subsequent formation on a state network with various models of how projects may be organized. "It will also provide an opportunity to link HS/HT to other VR services, and to Georgia's workforce system as a whole" said Ron Williams, the newly appointed State Program Director.