Building from a Strong Foundation: The Evolution of Technical Assistance at Think College
A blog post by the fantastic technical assistance duo, Cate Weir and Chelsea Stinnett. Enjoy this collaborative reflection on the evolution of technical assistance at Think College.
Chelsea: I started in the field in 2015. One day, I found out that college programs for people with intellectual disability existed and I couldn’t believe it! It was a perfect field for me that combined my love for higher education and student affairs with educating people with intellectual disability. I wasn’t constrained by the red tape of the K-12 system and I could talk about topics like sex, taking risks, and owning your ability to make your own decisions. Shortly after, I also found out about Think College. There was a whole center and field associated with my new love I just found—how exciting!
Today, I continue to hear the same story about how new faces to the field found postsecondary education (PSE) for students with intellectual disability. I smile as they share their excitement because their story is my story—and it may be your story, too. So many years and experiences later and I still shake my head in disbelief at times, remembering “the time before” when I was unaware of PSE for students with intellectual disability. And now I’m the person that fields questions and provides answers to over a hundred people every month. In the past year and a half since joining the Think College team, I’ve had a front row seat to witnessing what we do, day in and day out, providing technical assistance (TA) to so many people: programs, parents, students, faculty, administrators, legislators, vocational rehabilitation counselors, teachers, and more. And while I find myself in awe at the sheer numbers of folks we assist and the nuanced topics we tackle, I’m even more amazed at the growth and change we’ve experienced as a TA center in the 14 years we’ve been funded as the National Coordinating Center.
Cate: That’s where I come in; let me give you a little background information. I started at Think College almost before it was Think College! In 2008, federal funding was becoming available to support PSE programs, and I was so excited! This was an area I had been working at a grassroots level on since the 1990’s. I was seeing individual successes, but little systems change. When I heard that the Higher Education Act was reauthorized in 2008 (as the Higher Education Reauthorization Act), and included students with intellectual disability, I knew that was a game changer. I was fortunate to get a job at the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) working on federal projects related to PSE for students with intellectual disability, and helped write the first grant proposal for the Think College National Coordinating Center. And so I was there, on the front lines, to witness and support the growth of PSE options for students with intellectual disability and to start the arduous task of actual systems change. Amazing!
These 15 years have seen steady growth in the number and quality of options available. At the start, we provided TA and collaborated with the other “early adopters,” the folks that had, like me, been waiting for the opportunity to truly transform higher education to include everyone that wanted to pursue a college education. At that time, there were many different approaches being discussed and implemented. There was no one right way to do it. One of the first things we did was to set out some principles that still continue today: that the opportunities needed to be inclusive, authentic, meaningful, and lead to real results for students. It was not then and is not now special education classrooms on a college campus.
The questions then were challenging, sure, but perhaps more fundamental: How do you really include students with intellectual disability when college is set up to be exclusionary? Can it really be meaningful? What’s the point? How do we talk to administrators, how do we find funds to support program development, how can we just get things going? As the years passed, those questions are still among the most common, but now, with a foundation of over 300 programs across the country (compared to about 100 options of varying quality and design 15 years ago) the needs have, to use Chelsea’s words, become more nuanced, and more complex, as well. What are the best approaches to create an admissions process that is fair when we are overwhelmed with applications? What are the best ways to manage student conduct complaints? How do we support young adults to make informed choices in the complicated and more independent world of a college campus? How do we prepare for program accreditation?
Fifteen years ago, there were no standards associated with college programs for students with intellectual disability. The approach could be determined at the local level, with no specific requirements for program operations. Think College developed Guiding Principles and Practices in 2011 to help provide that structure, but today we have formal accreditation standards and an accreditation process administered by an independent accreditation agency. The field is no longer a fringey idea with primarily grassroots, local support. It is an area that the United States Department of Education has invested millions of dollars into establishing and developing. With that comes a better understanding of why we do it, and brings many more questions about how to do it, and how to manage the details of truly embedding these programs into the infrastructure of colleges and universities across the country.
When Think College began providing TA to a national audience, we had a cobbled together system of folders in my inbox and basic manual tracking mechanisms. It worked, and we helped a lot of professionals, families, and students by establishing an approach and delivering TA based on our philosophy: to meet people where they are, be responsive, be helpful, create connections with peers who could provide good examples, provide resources as well as guidance, and to research the answers to questions when we did not know the answers.
Chelsea: This is still how we do it today, but now we use formal help desk software and can run on-demand reports and track hours, topics, and customers much more accurately. But while the systems may have become more formalized, and the questions more diverse and sometimes more complicated, what has not changed is our philosophy: approachable, non-judgemental, collaborative and full of resources that we’ve spent 15 years cultivating and refining. We’ve learned so many lessons from the people who literally built the field before our eyes. We’re also learning from the bright new crop of emerging leaders who are dedicated to following in the footsteps of those who’ve gone before them. We’re not here to judge or condone or tell anyone what to do. We are committed to being there when you need us, meeting you where you are, and using our collective knowledge of the past and trends we’ve identified for the future to do what we’ve been doing best for 15 years: create more options and opportunities for college students with intellectual disability and be your partner throughout it all.
About the post authors: Chelsea VanHorn Stinnett, PhD, is the Technical Assistance Coordinator for Think College and a former program director. She is dedicated to helping as many people as she possibly can to make college a reality for more students with intellectual disability.. Cate Weir is the project coordinator for the Think College National Coordinating Center. Her favorite part of that job is providing technical assistance to help increase the number and quality of college opportunities across the US.