Tony's Comments and His Mother's Comments After VR

My life has changed. I know, like, sometimes I have girls around me, so that's why my life has changed. There are lots of girls around me. I graduated from school in 1997. I have my high school diploma. My senior year - on the day that I graduated I had a party. I went to the prom. And then I went to another party. We started like at 1:00 o'clock in the middle of the night. And it ended in a 4:00a.m. - it seemed like 6:30 in the morning. So I was the only one not tired.

I do a lot of stuff. Every Monday I like my movie. I finished lifeguard training last week. I took the test. I think I passed.

My job is okay. I get to meet new friends, and I'm working hard. Well, I did - I do all my job and it's like the pay depends on your skill, on your skill level. My skill level is, my skill level went up very high, so pretty soon I'll be cooking. But I don't know if I'm going to cook or not because I haven't told them yet. Right now I'm cleaning. That's my main job is to clean - the lobby area. Sometimes I take the breadsticks around. It depends how busy I am cleaning and if Suzy needs some help, like if there are lots of people here. More than she can take the breadsticks to. I got a little problem cleaning. See this table right here is real clean. See how clean it is? I sometimes may make a mistake and clean it. I clean tables when they're dirty.

And sometimes I'll, I'll waste time doing trays. Like when the tray goes over there by the concession stand over there. I waste my time like carrying one tray over at a time. But sometimes I like to put it behind my back, behind my back and pass the tray to other hand. Sometimes I use a towel, and put it behind my back or probably just throw it or catch it behind my back. And sometimes I throw it over my shoulders and I'll throw it over my shoulder onto the table. Very slick.

And Laura has always been my job coach. I've been working here for like a year or something like that. And so don't be like goofing off like Laura is doing right now.

What I remember, mostly, about VR is the meetings. Meetings all the time. And I got like all the time, like back and forth. They got like meetings after meetings after meetings. Actually, a meeting is about me and my life, what I want to do when I grow up. So that's pretty good. And Lillian is good. She helps make sure, like, I know what everyone is talking about.

You have to fill out paper to get into the job. But… I'll tell you how. It's a paper I got in the mail for my job. That's how I found out I got the job, in the mail. They said I was in. I was, I was a, I am the best, the best there is, the best there ever will be, so. . . . Going to sail, sail away.

Tony's Mother's Comments after VR

Right now it's exciting because Tony just finished the lifesaving classes. He took a two-week class in CPR, first aid, and lifesaving. They were in the evenings, so they didn't conflict with his work. He took the class and really enjoyed it. I didn't expect him to get his certificate the first time, but he learned quite a bit. He wants to do it again. So when one's offered again, we're trying to arrange for him to take it again. I think if we could find one to offer it over a longer period to time, it might work out better for Tony. It's so much to learn in such a short period. On the exam, he passed all of his swimming and some of the lifesaving. CPR was a little more difficult for him. I was pretty happy with how well he did.

Tony's is still interested in music. He's been experimenting all day on the computer pulling up lyrics. And he still wants to have a band. It sounds far-fetched to me, but I really don't know what he can do so . . . I don't think he should give up his day job yet. But, he's done a lot of things that I really didn't expect. I would never have believed that he would be an excellent swimmer and swim well enough to pass lifeguard training, but he does!

Tony would like to live on his own. We don't know how far he's going to go with that. We have case management with an instructor that comes each week to work on life skills. So we're preparing him in that direction, but we really have no idea at what point he'll get there. It's one of those things he doesn't really want to discuss yet. The case manager asked us last week if we want to put him on a waiting list for supported living, and we decided to get him ready first and then see where he's at. We're working on things like transportation, counting money. So even though he's not in school, he's continuing to learn and continuing to grow.

And the job that he got through Voc Rehab has helped him grow so much. You can just see how proud he is when he says "I have to get ready to go to work."

It would have been nice if we had access to Voc Rehab sooner than Tony's last year in school. I know they're trying to do more of that now with what they call "transition planning". It would be great if there were a way parents could be made aware sooner of the resources that are out there. I sort of muddled through, not realizing that the first agency really wasn't doing their job. If I had known that what was happening was not the way it was supposed to work, maybe I would have done something sooner. But I kept thinking "these people are trying to help my child find a job, and I don't want to start all over. Besides, they know him." I guess being aware of what an agency is supposed to do would have been a big help for me.

The Rehab Counselor did help some, but she had to be careful. She couldn't say, "Do you want to can this agency?" because that would be pushing us. She'd say, "What would you like to do?" She was trying to be pretty neutral. But I think if I had realized that some agencies would actually have come two or three days a week and take him out to job sites and let him try out jobs, I would have made a different choice. I didn't quite know what to expect. I just knew Tony was graduating, and we didn't know how to find a job. And everything the first agency said sounded so good-"we're really interested in job development, finding something that fits the person, finding something they're interested in The first thing they were going to do was ask the places he'd already worked if they would hire him, but they just never could seem to make it out to these places. They just kept saying they couldn't find the place. I mean looking back I think, "How did I not see this?" Tony sat home for a year! Month after month, I'd call and say, "So what's going on?" When we finally got into a second agency, they would call every week. They arranged to put him in classes to build his skills. I about fell over when they asked, "How many days a week do you want him to come in?" It wasn't until then that I realized that Tony was never getting what he was supposed to from the first agency.

I feel like I was incredibly dumb about the process. I had a lot of people helping me, but I didn't always ask the right questions because I didn't know what to expect. I felt like the Voc Rehab Counselor helped me a lot. I wish that I had known her before Tony got out of school. I had always heard about transition plans but had no clue what one was. I didn't know what services to demand.

They kept putting us off. They finally showed up the last day of school, which of course was too late to do anything. I only knew they showed up at all because his teacher told me! The Voc Rehab Counselor helped us to put some pressure on them. At the last minute they pulled everything together. I found him a summer job through the CARE Program. That's when they decided they couldn't do any job development because they might find him a job while he was already working?! Now I realize that sounds really stupid, but that's what they told me. That's what I believed. So they didn't start until the August after he'd already graduated from school. By September and October I was beginning to get upset because he had been out of school since May. By November , they still hadn't done anything.

This is a child who had volunteered for three years at a vet clinic and had two summer jobs. So I just assumed that he was employable. There was always some excuse. Once they called and said he couldn't find the vet clinic he was working at to do an assessment. Finally I set a deadline. I think it was January. After dealing with them for an entire year, and they'd done virtually nothing as far as I was concerned. That's when we called Voc Rehab and asked if we could change agencies?" And we had to start all over again.

The next experience went much smoother and much quicker. He is working! It wasn't in the type of job that I thought I wanted him to have. Initially that was kind of hard. He had like five years experience in a vet clinic, and I thought, "Gee, this would be a great, nice, safe place to work." And nobody could ever manage to get to there and ask them, "Do you want to hire him?" And they found a different kind of job. It turns out that he likes the job, and they like him. What I expected wasn't necessarily what he needed. Now he's with the public, and it's social. There's some benefits to it.

I sort of thought he could do more than just hand out breadsticks for a job. Then I realized at, at his age I didn't have a much better job than that either. I was making popcorn and selling junk food at a movie theater, and that's not much of a job. The job is meeting Tony's needs, and he likes it. So I had to adjust what I expected to some degree. But that doesn't change how proud we are of him. He just does so much with his life, and that's what we want for him - a full, happy life. Of course it's not always happy, but life's not happy all the time for anyone. You always have things that happen - you mess something up and feel bad, or you get your feelings hurt about something, or you get frustrated with things. That's part of having a full life, so Tony has those things, too. But he's out there doing all of it, and he has lots of dreams. And that's what we want, really - for him to be able to dream. So we are very happy for him.

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