Students Helping Students The Department of Special Education’s HIRE ME Program Provides Education Through Experience For two mornings each week of the academic year, local high school students meet bright and early with Ship undergraduates to gain practical experience that will prepare them for the future. High school students with disabilities from Shippensburg Area and Big Spring School Districts receive coaching and work experience at job sites across campus. The undergraduates, working as job coaches, receive experience working with and fostering the development of students with disabilities. Overseen by Dr. Thomas Gibbon, associate professor and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Special Education, the Helping Individuals Reach Employment Milestones Everyday (HIRE ME) program is part of the College of Education and Human Services (CEHS) Special Education program. The program is administered
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The program was a great working “experience. It can help us when we get out there and get a real job.” Jamie Clark, Big Spring High School ’21 (above) by a graduate student and employs approximately fourteen undergraduate students to help high school students develop and practice vocational and social skills each semester. The roughly thirty high school students have the opportunity to work at job sites on campus like Reisner Dining Hall, Starbucks, Ezra Lehman Memorial Library, Dunkin’ Donuts, and multiple administrative offices, including the CEHS Office of the Dean and CEHS Department of Social Work and Gerontology. “Students with disabilities are getting actual training at an actual job site,” Gibbon said. More often than not,
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he explained, these students will be pigeonholed to certain jobs when they graduate from high school. They will be assigned jobs like cart return or basic food service without the chance to use higher skill sets like clerical skills. “This program gives them the opportunity to be a competitive employee by experiencing real work and learning hard skills at a variety of different job sites,” Gibbon continued. “They also learn soft skills such as working with a supervisor, appropriate interactions, conduct, dressing for work, and showing up on time.”
