WBEZ Chicago:
School districts prepare students for post-grad life, but skills and potential are lost as Chicago families try to figure out the next steps on their own.
Seven months after he graduated from an occupational high school for students with disabilities on Chicago’s Northwest Side, Carlos Mejia longs to walk the hallways again.
“I feel kind of sad and devastated because I wish [school] could go all the way to 30 years old,” says the 23-year-old, who lives with autism and epilepsy.
He misses seeing his friends every day, going to class, having fourth-period lunch and participating in the bowling club at Vaughn Occupational, a Chicago public school.
Mejia’s parents, too, miss the structure, routine and skills that the school gave their son. Besides the academic foundation, Vaughn also taught him how to use the public transportation system, shop for groceries and use Google Maps to get around.
As Carlos neared graduation, the Mejias were given a packet with resources for job training and day programs. “It was, you know, ‘Here’s the list, call them [and] find out.’ I didn’t want him just to stay home on his phone and his iPad,” recalls Maria Mejia, 61.
But the Mejias quickly discovered that programs were too expensive without the help of state funding for people with disabilities.
Moreover, Carlos wants to work. Gifted with a knack for memorization and organization, he says his dream job is at a bookstore.
“I want to sell books. I would like to organize some comic books, graphic novels, everything,” he says.
For now, Maria Mejia has been filling Carlos’ days with a park district program here, a free class offered by a nonprofit there, all while making calls to various state agencies to ask about funding — some for which the Mejias first applied when Carlos was around 5 years old.
Her son is among tens of thousands of Chicagoans with intellectual disabilities who have aged out of school and are now left hanging. As they confront funding delays and a complicated service system many describe as a “maze,” young people with disabilities risk losing the skills they worked so hard to develop in school.
“It is very much being pushed off of a cliff, without any resources,” said Josh Long, chief of Chicago Public Schools’ Office for Students with Disabilities. This comes, he added, after the school district invested “millions of dollars, per the federal law, in special education from [age] 3 to 22 in a public school setting.”
Long was principal at Southside Occupational High School for 14 years before moving to the district’s central office. He has seen, time and time again, how graduates “go home, sit on the couch, have a sedentary lifestyle.” That result is lost potential among young people all across the city.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE, HERE: https://www.wbez.org/education/2025/01/15/young-adults-with-developmental-disabilities-face-a-cliff-after-they-graduate-high-school