National Post School Outcome Data Community of Practice ------------------------------------------------------
Hi everybody - I've finally subscribed to this community of practice as I need some input to guide Iowa's reporting of % of students in competitive employment one year after high school for reporting on OSEP Indicator B-13. Iowa is in the process of finalizing our survey before this spring's administration of the 1 year follow-up. In doing so, we want to make sure that we can identify students who are competitively employed. Our stakeholder group is pretty split on their philosophies of what needs to be considered when making the decision whether the employment is competitive. Their preference right now is to incorporate various components of the definition within our survey so that we can actually use different formulas to choose the most appropriate definition. We've done the research on the various definitions - including RSA and think we have everything in our survey EXCEPT something that gets to the inclusiveness of the work site. I've looked at the PSO questions and a few others including NLTS2. Our difficulty is that we survey both youth with and without disabilities so have to be careful with our wording so that everybody understands it and it applies to most people. (In this sense we're leaning more towards an adaptation of the NLTS2 question which asks: At your job, do any of the other workers have disabilities?). We would like to know, however, if there is a better way? Specifically, our questions are: 1. What definition of competitive employment will your state be using to report Indicator B-14? Does it include inclusiveness of the work site? 2. If that definition includes inclusiveness of the work site - how will that be identified? Any input would be much appreciated. Barb Guy Iowa Department of Education Transition/Work-Experience Consultant
