CHICAGO—On an overcast afternoon in May, the gymnasium of an oppressively beige school building on Chicago’s South Side was teeming with giddy students. Southside Occupational Academy was about a month out from the end of the school year and its 268 students were preparing for the school’s first farmers market. They fidgeted restlessly, eager to get to work, ringing up cash registers, serving food they cooked themselves in the school’s kitchen, showing off pieces of art and screen-printed garments made in its studios.

This is not a regular vocational school. It’s an experiment in transitional education in an economically distressed part of town that offers few advantages for kids who graduate high school, much less ones who have intellectual and developmental disabilities. And it might be a new model for how special education students can avoid a trap that many fall into after graduation—languishing without skills, without a job and unable to navigate life independently.

Southside is part of the public school system but as a “transition center” it does not provide a standard high school curriculum. Instead it gives its students, ages 16 to 21, up to four additional years of free public education to help prepare them for living on their own and possibly a job. Students work in a garden, a workshop stocked with power tools, even an on-site chicken coop—not because they’re likely to become farmers or carpenters, but to build their confidence and comfort with basic workaday tasks.

The concept of a transitional school created for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities is something of a break with decades of educational theory that said it was better to integrate students than to isolate them in substandard warehouses. But this is what makes Southside’s approach unique: It is not replacement for traditional, integrated high school, it’s a complement to it.

Although not a requirement, Principal Joshua Long’s hope is for his students to have completed four years at a mainstream school before passing through Southside’s doors for the first time. He estimates that about 85% to 90% of the school’s current students have done so.

“I say this a lot to high schools: You’re the ones who know how to do high school, and you do it best. So, our students should stay with you, and get the high school experience, and then move on to us to do transition,” said Long, who became the principal at Southside in 2010 after spending most of his career as a speech pathologist. “We look at ourselves as similar to a technical or community college.”

The memory of how negligently special education students were treated makes some experts bristle at the thought that students might be warehoused this way again. Why take high school- and college-aged students out of classrooms where they would otherwise mingle with typically abled students? Southside’s existence is predicated on the idea that fully integrated education isn’t always the best approach for “diverse learners,” as they’re classified by Chicago Public Schools.


Long sees Southside’s closed setting as a strength, giving him the ability to leverage the scale and resources of a major school district to give a sometimes-dauntingly diverse group of students the tools and focused attention they’ll need to face the world outside its confines.

Dr. Elizabeth Keenan, Chief of CPS’ Office of Diverse Learner Supports & Services, affirms that the students who go into one of the district’s four “specialty high schools,” as Southside is designated, are following the most appropriate path as determined by their Individualized Education Program, or IEP. “These are kids who have additional support outside their academics, who might require peer professional support, whose function or ability is discrepant from kids in the average IQ range,” Keenan said.

“We see kids who go into transition support services that eventually might go into group homes, they might need additional support beyond high school, they would have difficulty living on their own.”

Southside Occupational Academy students collect donations through the Aktion Club, a service group for adults with disabilities under the Kiwanis organization. | Courtesy of CPS

To that end, schools like Long’s transition center provide not just vocational training, but instruction in basic life skills. In addition to its work spaces, Southside boasts its own simulated apartment, where students practice everything from bed-making to entertaining guests. Here social skills enter the equation as well, a not-insignificant aspect of workplace success aside from the students’ ability to accomplish tasks.

Advocates for transition centers and similar programs say the dedicated environment allows students to build confidence in a setting where they’re surrounded by peers and attended to by qualified special educators.

Still, some experts say the bar for inclusivity could be set higher.

Shawn Ullman is the director of The [email protected], a group that advocates for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities and works with educators across the country. She expressed skepticism at the necessity of dedicated transition centers like Southside. “I’ve seen schools that are supposed to be employment and vocational focused, and they do some basic job skills and then help you get a placement in the community, and why that can’t happen in a more integrated setting isn’t clear to me,” Ullman said. “Schools should be moving away from this and towards a more integrated model.”

Dr. John Butterworth, a senior research fellow at UMass Boston’s Institute for Community Inclusion, also questioned the transition center’s fundamental approach. “For people who are ready for work then I’d start thinking about job placement, and that’s an approach that doesn’t need to be center-based,” Butterworth said. “(This new approach) means restructuring resources in ways that are individually driven, around jobs where the students live, or where they want to live once they graduate.” Other experts echoed this criticism, saying live-fire, on-the-job training is the only way to authentically prepare students for the workplace.

Long doesn’t entirely disagree about the need for real-world experience. The school has long partnered with community employers to place students in supervised internships at places like Chicago’s Navy Pier. This year the school is implementing a program that will take some students off the main campus altogether; each day they will meet at a location downtown and, with the assistance of faculty, take public transit to their job sites.

Employer partnerships like these are another benefit of operating at the scale enabled by the public school system. Regina Tottenham is the principal of New York City’s Brooklyn Transition Center, which operates a similar program to Southside’s. She sees large public programs as having a unique strength in their ability to make the case for students with special needs to otherwise reluctant employers.

“Going to a random worksite for a random student isn’t as successful as me going to a corporation and saying that we’ve had success working at a Trader Joe’s, or a Modell’s. I can prove to them, here’s an indemnity form, I’ve done it before, it’s an easy model,” Tottenham said. “For a random kid in a random school district in the middle of nowhere it’s more challenging, and they don’t have the backing, they can’t point to an example.”

But even the highest-functioning students struggle to find gainful, meaningful employment. And the problem is compounded in struggling neighborhoods like Southside’s West Englewood where the overall unemployment rate hovers near 40 percent. As of 2015 the rate of integrated employment in Illinois for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities was just 7 percent, one of the nation’s lowest.

Still, there are successes. Sharon Bojan, the department chair of Southside’s employment programs, points to Navy Pier’s hiring last year of four of the school’s graduates for custodial and food service jobs. When current students visit the job site they look up to them as heroes, she says. And the program has benefits beyond an employment outcome. “I’ve done this program for 6 or 7 years now, and in my second year I had a student who had missed 70 days of class,” Bojan said. “Next year, when he started our job program, it dropped to two or three days. I heard him tell his girlfriend on the phone, ‘I gotta go, I’m at work.’ Not school, work.”

