There's three really good
ways of job advancement that I can think of. Each of them has
their own benefits, and their own prerequisites. Some of them have
little quirks too. This is not a comprehensive list- just things that I've been seeing that have natural job advancement paths for paraprofessionals willing to get up, do the extra trainings, go the extra mile, etc, without trying to be teachers themselves.
The other thing to keep a note of is that this is for people who live in Illinois. People in other states may well have better advancement opportunities due to... well, the state actually paying the people who work in that profession with money instead of IOUs.
1. QMRP
Okay, QMRP is a word
that's been used by people everywhere. It stands for Qualified Mental
Retardation Professional. Most states haven't changed the language,
since it's something that everyone says, and has a very specific role
organizationally. Illinois, however, decided that they should change it
anyways, and it's QIDP, which stands for Qualified Intellectual Disability Professional.
Functionally, they're the exact same thing. They act as a case-worker
as opposed to a direct service staff, are given a little more money, and
a little more responsibility.
http://www.dhs.state.il.us/page.aspx?item=45705
http://www.dhs.state.il.us/onenetlibrary/12/documents/Forms/IL462-0130.pdf
Depending
on your educational background, being qualified to take the training
could be easier or harder. I, for instance, have a business degree, so
I'd have to argue to have it be something relevant. Then I'd have to
take the training. I'd do some research if I were you, about who
is hiring QIDPs and how much they make, if you were interested in this
route.
2. Intraorganizational Advancement
Because
these organizations are larger, and not affiliated primarily with the
education field, they have positions that are more general, which may
not require the degrees or certifications that are often required by
state. For me, that means that I might have luck in the business side
of things, after perhaps doing some job shadowing and volunteering.
It'll be kinda hellish for a bit, but it'd give me a position that I
could pretty much take to any company, and be considered valuable for
it.
http://sj.tbe.taleo.net/CH18/ats/careers/jobSearch.jsp?org=LITTLECITY&cws=1
http://www.misericordia.com/careers/default.aspx
http://www.clearbrook.org/jobs
What
I'm going to say now has to do with my experience with Little City and
business culture in general, but MAY not be applicable to Clearbrook or
Miseracordia. After my probationary period (90 days, which they don't offer any
of the benefits. P. typical for non-profits and for-profits), I can
apply with special privilege to other places within the organization,
and simply be moved there. That means getting job advancement is a lot
easier once I've already begun to work for Little City. It also means
that if I wanted to live in Chicago instead of Palatine (which I very
well may), that after 90 days, I could apply for a switch, and not have
any major difficulties because of it.
3. Educator Funding
The
final possibility is that if you want to play more of an educator role,
many school districts, and the state government often have money set
aside for people who want to become educators. The money comes with
stipulations (like, for Illinois, if you take money to become a special
education teacher, you have to work in Illinois as a special education
teacher for four years), and probably would be more available in more
traditional school districts. I don't have a lot of specific
information for this, so if anyone else does, just post in the comments, and I'd be happy to amend the post here.. I know money is tight in
Illinois, so my information on this might be a bit dated. But if you
wanted to eventually become a specialist or a teacher, this might be a
good route to strive for.
Special Note:This is the kind of post that might be updated somewhat regularly, as it is one of the biggest question marks, I feel, in a paraprofessional's career: I make no money, where do I go next? Now, my personal method of job advancement was to try and start a day program myself, and if you had the funds from loans, good business experience and ethic, a couple of good partners, some grant writing experience, some salesmanship background, a good accountant and a good lawyer... That might be a good option for you too. Skip the middleman, and become your own boss. I'll write much more detailed articles involving that, however, given that my experience lends me the insight to write those articles separately.
As always, any personal insight, please send me an e-mail at barrypetersen2@gmail.com or add something onto the comments section below.
Friday, January 31, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
The Care Campaign
Right now, I wanted to open up and talk about something I found while around the administrative building of my new workplace. It's called The Care Campaign. Never heard about it? Neither had I.
http://carecampaignhome.com/
What is it? Well, it appears to be an organization dedicated to the effort of raising pay for paraprofessionals and direct service workers in the special needs community. I'm not sure why I thought you guys might want to hear about it. I must be momentarily whimsical.
The effort seems to be a coalition effort between organizations which pay these professionals, parents, and of course the paraprofessionals and direct service people themselves. It has to deal with how the state decides wages for people which are in the employ of companies receiving state funds. Which sounds complicated, but essentially what it boils down to is that when the State determines how much a person serving your job is worth, per hour, it uses a specific figure. When they give money to parents and organizations which hire us, they use that figure. In many organizations, that's simply as much as you can earn. I'm not entirely sure if you can even pay above and beyond that, if you wanted to, and still make use of the money. If you know the answer, let me know in the comments, and I'll amend the post.
The reason why parents and administrators want you to get paid more is simple. They know that the job is hard on some days, and they know we don't make much. If you read the claims that the websites make, direct service members make wages below the poverty line, which- all things considering- wouldn't exactly surprise me. Companies and parents know that if highly qualified people can't make decent wages, especially to the point where it makes it difficult to survive, then turnover is more likely. The campaign benefits them as much as it does us.
Like many advocacy groups, what The Care Campaign wants you to do is to educate yourself and sign a petition. I'm going to do some more research about the group from non-affiliated sites before I suggest that you do this, but I do think you should know that such a campaign is out there. If they're on the up=and-up you might want to consider signing the petition and telling your employer about the campaign as well. Remember, it helps them if it helps you. I've heard rumors that a starving TA doesn't perform as well.
If you know anything more about this campaign, or are involved with it on any level, give me a shout-out in the comments, and I'd love to hear more about it. Peace.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
A brief history of Barry D. Petersen II
Hello everyone, my name is Barry D. Petersen II. Government forms and people who don't know me very well often forget the fact that I am a sequel, which often makes mail very confusing for my father and I.
I went to school for Business Management. I've always liked the idea of being a leader-type, and I have a strange fondness for the simplicity of honest business. I also took a minor in Speech Communication, because I love learning about it. Honestly, I really enjoy to learn about a lot of things, and it helps me to keep myself occupied.
About halfway through my college experience, I decided to live off-campus. Now, I don't know if you remember the 2006-era era economy, but there were no jobs. I struggled to find work doing things that I had been doing, namely driving pizzas. And, with previous years of experience in pizza driving, I learned pretty quick that you didn't get to take home much of a paycheck. After the previous summer, I took home barely more than a thousand dollars, after expenses. Afterall, gas was pretty expensive back then, though it's pretty expensive right now, so that may not come to you as all that much of a surprise.
So, I went to a job placement center to work as a temp. I got a warehouse position, dragging boxes in and out of trailers, stacking them. The work was... brutal. The trailers were not refrigerated, so they'd be hot and dark. I'd spend about 12 hours moving boxes, no one really talking. I survived about 2 weeks, and I loathed it. I went to bed when I got home, and woke up then went to work. Life was a dark room carrying boxes in silence.
That same summer was my sister's first job at a summer day camp for kids and teens who had special needs. She was going on field trips, meeting people, being part of a team... And yet, I hadn't even considered this a job opportunity. Didn't even cross my mind. Sometimes I'm a little oblivious, so that may take part of the blame, but part of it was simply that I did not realize that special needs was part of MY world. I mean, I wasn't, like, delusional. I know that it was part of THE world, I just didn't think it had anything to do with me. Without any positive or negative connotation, it sort of was like a 'separate but equal' world. You may have heard that phrase before. That's why I wrote it. See? I'm a clever author.
It wasn't until the next summer came along that I considered working for the same summer day camp. My mother, actually, suggested it. She had stressed that I sort of needed a job to, you know, feed myself. She is a special needs teacher during the year, by the way, but don't let that fool you. She just knew that I was going to find a way out of working at all. Oh my teenage years, how I miss you. I started to come up with reasons I couldn't do it. "I don't know if I'd get along with people with special needs (I don't know how I would have phrased it at this time, but I sure as hell didn't have 'people-first-language' down)", "What if I mess up?" My mother, calmly and simply stated, "All you have to do is be a friend to a person who has special needs. They take you on field trips, and have fun doing things, and all you really need to do is let them have fun."
This wasn't wholly correct, by the way. I was terrified that I, the sort of whimsical, forgetful person that I tend to be, might do something like lose a person, or not know how to stop someone from walking into the street or something. She reminded me that I could go back to working my warehouse job, and look at that, I was suddenly a Camp Counselor at a Summer Camp for kids and adults who had special needs. My first parent meeting reminded me of my original fears: I know, when I think about the whole of the family, and my contact with the mother of the first person that I worked with, that she was a kind lady. And yet, the only like I can remember, verbatim, that she said during that meeting was "If I ever find out that you left (my child) in the bathroom alone, I will hunt you down and kill you."
Yeeesh. Tough crowd. No really though, she is honest and truly a very nice lady. Years after I worked with her child, she remembered my face, and gave me a big hug as we caught up a little. I'm NOT that great at staying in contact with people, so while some paras build fantastic relationship with the families of those they work with, this parent and I hadn't talked since the last note that she had written me, the last day I had worked with her child. The reunion was sweet and kind. Not that I have any doubt that she was totally serious about her death threat, mind you.
Nor would I blame her if she was. We weren't working with single-person bathrooms here, we were working with communal bathrooms with stalls. There are a lot of people who will bend over backwards to make sure our guys are safe and considered equal, and taken care of. And there are a lot of people who will take advantage of them. That's a true fact no matter where you go or what you do. People are sometimes great. People sometimes suck.
Despite all this, I managed to survive my first year. It was... lackluster. I don't feel like... My participant and I didn't bond, mind you, but I find that for many paraprofessionals, their first year on the job is sort of fruitless. Not a lot of emotional incentive to continue. And so I went to school, and graduated. I graduated a four year degree in three and-a-half years. That has very little to do with anything, but I just wanted to rub that in.
Actually, for that half year extra I 'saved' by graduating early, I ended up spending most of it unemployed, getting fat and drunk and depressed in my basement. It was 2009. I was looking for something that a degree in business management would help me obtain. Monster.com was offering jobs for Supervisors at Chuck E Cheeses, which I would have been glad to take if it didn't require ten years of restaurant management experience. Read that correctly. Not just ten years of management experience. Not just ten years working in a restaurant. To be qualified for that job, you had to, according to the company hiring, have worked as the manager of a restaurant for ten years.
Yeeesh. Tough crowd.
So, when summer came around, I was plenty happy to jump back to the summer camp, and make some temporary money at least. And you know, get out of the basement. Get some color. That sort of thing. Except, this time around, I had an amazing, fantastic time. I worked with a participant that I got along with exceptionally well, and we had a simply amazing summer. So much so, that people took notice of me, and when the end of the summer came, my supervisor said that she'd give me a recommendation towards the school district that she worked for during the year.
And that's what I did for two years. I worked in a school transitions program, out in a building in the community. I did a lot of things there, met some cool people. One of the things we had a lot of fear and anxiety about is where our guys would go when they graduated. And, in Illinois, 'graduated' means when that the state dumps them on the day of their 22nd birthday. We kept running into three things: 1) Programs that would not accept our individuals due to the perceived difficulty of taking them into their program. 2) Programs which could not accept our individuals into their programs because of being full already. 3) Programs which would accept our participants, take the money for the year, and then kick them out when our support staff stopped getting sent with them, usually soon after the day of their 22nd birthday.
And from there a couple of the paras and I thought we'd try our hand at a day program. I'll talk about this, probably a good deal later. For right now, I just want to say, it was a LOT harder AND a LOT easier than I thought it would be. This is a big thing that I've done that's given me a lot of bargaining power with employers afterwards, and, honestly, despite the investment, was not too hard to setup. That being said, the program closed due to too few participants, and not bringing in enough money.
I bumbled around for a little bit, working at a day school, and now working at an adult living facility and day center. It's... a big facility compared to the others I'd worked at before, and I'm still relatively new here, so I'm sure I'm going to get a unique perspective by working here.
That being said, that's most of what I have to say about the matter of my history. Obviously, it gets a lot more complex in there, especially at some places, but that will be for another time and another post.
I went to school for Business Management. I've always liked the idea of being a leader-type, and I have a strange fondness for the simplicity of honest business. I also took a minor in Speech Communication, because I love learning about it. Honestly, I really enjoy to learn about a lot of things, and it helps me to keep myself occupied.
About halfway through my college experience, I decided to live off-campus. Now, I don't know if you remember the 2006-era era economy, but there were no jobs. I struggled to find work doing things that I had been doing, namely driving pizzas. And, with previous years of experience in pizza driving, I learned pretty quick that you didn't get to take home much of a paycheck. After the previous summer, I took home barely more than a thousand dollars, after expenses. Afterall, gas was pretty expensive back then, though it's pretty expensive right now, so that may not come to you as all that much of a surprise.
So, I went to a job placement center to work as a temp. I got a warehouse position, dragging boxes in and out of trailers, stacking them. The work was... brutal. The trailers were not refrigerated, so they'd be hot and dark. I'd spend about 12 hours moving boxes, no one really talking. I survived about 2 weeks, and I loathed it. I went to bed when I got home, and woke up then went to work. Life was a dark room carrying boxes in silence.
That same summer was my sister's first job at a summer day camp for kids and teens who had special needs. She was going on field trips, meeting people, being part of a team... And yet, I hadn't even considered this a job opportunity. Didn't even cross my mind. Sometimes I'm a little oblivious, so that may take part of the blame, but part of it was simply that I did not realize that special needs was part of MY world. I mean, I wasn't, like, delusional. I know that it was part of THE world, I just didn't think it had anything to do with me. Without any positive or negative connotation, it sort of was like a 'separate but equal' world. You may have heard that phrase before. That's why I wrote it. See? I'm a clever author.
It wasn't until the next summer came along that I considered working for the same summer day camp. My mother, actually, suggested it. She had stressed that I sort of needed a job to, you know, feed myself. She is a special needs teacher during the year, by the way, but don't let that fool you. She just knew that I was going to find a way out of working at all. Oh my teenage years, how I miss you. I started to come up with reasons I couldn't do it. "I don't know if I'd get along with people with special needs (I don't know how I would have phrased it at this time, but I sure as hell didn't have 'people-first-language' down)", "What if I mess up?" My mother, calmly and simply stated, "All you have to do is be a friend to a person who has special needs. They take you on field trips, and have fun doing things, and all you really need to do is let them have fun."
This wasn't wholly correct, by the way. I was terrified that I, the sort of whimsical, forgetful person that I tend to be, might do something like lose a person, or not know how to stop someone from walking into the street or something. She reminded me that I could go back to working my warehouse job, and look at that, I was suddenly a Camp Counselor at a Summer Camp for kids and adults who had special needs. My first parent meeting reminded me of my original fears: I know, when I think about the whole of the family, and my contact with the mother of the first person that I worked with, that she was a kind lady. And yet, the only like I can remember, verbatim, that she said during that meeting was "If I ever find out that you left (my child) in the bathroom alone, I will hunt you down and kill you."
Yeeesh. Tough crowd. No really though, she is honest and truly a very nice lady. Years after I worked with her child, she remembered my face, and gave me a big hug as we caught up a little. I'm NOT that great at staying in contact with people, so while some paras build fantastic relationship with the families of those they work with, this parent and I hadn't talked since the last note that she had written me, the last day I had worked with her child. The reunion was sweet and kind. Not that I have any doubt that she was totally serious about her death threat, mind you.
Nor would I blame her if she was. We weren't working with single-person bathrooms here, we were working with communal bathrooms with stalls. There are a lot of people who will bend over backwards to make sure our guys are safe and considered equal, and taken care of. And there are a lot of people who will take advantage of them. That's a true fact no matter where you go or what you do. People are sometimes great. People sometimes suck.
Despite all this, I managed to survive my first year. It was... lackluster. I don't feel like... My participant and I didn't bond, mind you, but I find that for many paraprofessionals, their first year on the job is sort of fruitless. Not a lot of emotional incentive to continue. And so I went to school, and graduated. I graduated a four year degree in three and-a-half years. That has very little to do with anything, but I just wanted to rub that in.
Actually, for that half year extra I 'saved' by graduating early, I ended up spending most of it unemployed, getting fat and drunk and depressed in my basement. It was 2009. I was looking for something that a degree in business management would help me obtain. Monster.com was offering jobs for Supervisors at Chuck E Cheeses, which I would have been glad to take if it didn't require ten years of restaurant management experience. Read that correctly. Not just ten years of management experience. Not just ten years working in a restaurant. To be qualified for that job, you had to, according to the company hiring, have worked as the manager of a restaurant for ten years.
Yeeesh. Tough crowd.
So, when summer came around, I was plenty happy to jump back to the summer camp, and make some temporary money at least. And you know, get out of the basement. Get some color. That sort of thing. Except, this time around, I had an amazing, fantastic time. I worked with a participant that I got along with exceptionally well, and we had a simply amazing summer. So much so, that people took notice of me, and when the end of the summer came, my supervisor said that she'd give me a recommendation towards the school district that she worked for during the year.
And that's what I did for two years. I worked in a school transitions program, out in a building in the community. I did a lot of things there, met some cool people. One of the things we had a lot of fear and anxiety about is where our guys would go when they graduated. And, in Illinois, 'graduated' means when that the state dumps them on the day of their 22nd birthday. We kept running into three things: 1) Programs that would not accept our individuals due to the perceived difficulty of taking them into their program. 2) Programs which could not accept our individuals into their programs because of being full already. 3) Programs which would accept our participants, take the money for the year, and then kick them out when our support staff stopped getting sent with them, usually soon after the day of their 22nd birthday.
And from there a couple of the paras and I thought we'd try our hand at a day program. I'll talk about this, probably a good deal later. For right now, I just want to say, it was a LOT harder AND a LOT easier than I thought it would be. This is a big thing that I've done that's given me a lot of bargaining power with employers afterwards, and, honestly, despite the investment, was not too hard to setup. That being said, the program closed due to too few participants, and not bringing in enough money.
I bumbled around for a little bit, working at a day school, and now working at an adult living facility and day center. It's... a big facility compared to the others I'd worked at before, and I'm still relatively new here, so I'm sure I'm going to get a unique perspective by working here.
That being said, that's most of what I have to say about the matter of my history. Obviously, it gets a lot more complex in there, especially at some places, but that will be for another time and another post.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Invitation
I
came up with an idea. I know that’s not the first time I’ve said that
phrase, but it’s something that’s been on my mind for awhile.
Let me preface this first:
I’ve worked in the special needs field for a number of years now. I’ve been everywhere from pre-K, to post-grad. I’ve seen school districts and non-profits and for profits and special needs specific school districts. I’ve worked with a variety of individuals who have been placed in these programs for a variety of reasons.
I think that what amazes me most about any of this, is the isolation. I’m not just talking for the students, who are looked down on by potential employers, by principals and school boards, by the uninitiated common person… But because of things like the NDA, and these same social stigmas that isolate students, I find that workers, and parents become isolated too. We have no one to turn to on a bad day, feeling locked out of our personal relationships because even our best, most understanding friends make off jokes or crude insights about the field. “Well, Barry, you’ve got a lot of experience in the field because you’ve known my son for so long, har har.” “Your student really is an inspiration because of, you know, the handicap.” Etc. When we don’t feel like we’re being actually watched for infidelity to the NDA- which we are reminded constantly by administrative policy and rhetoric that we are. They tell us ghost stories about a parent who was sitting right behind a loud mouthed para in a bar, and that parent was actually the CEO of literally everything, and then blacklisted the person for life from everything.
I mean, it’s real, and let’s understand this; these are real people, with real feelings, who if we’re making crude jokes or telling our own horror stories in public places, we’re doing some big no-nos toward. But the other side of the story is that we have a lot of people who, through fear of administration, of embarrassment, of unemployment… Are not able to talk to each other.
And let’s face it, this goes way past paraprofessionals talking between organizations. Getting volunteer opportunities for our guys or donors for the organizations that hire us is like a bloody turf war. Instead of building together, we watch out for our own, and burn bridges to keep whats ours, ours. The people who get paid big bucks to build our community together and put a safety net out there for our guys are just as catty as high schoolers or drug warlords.
This is done on a level way larger than us paras have the ability to affect, but I think if we want to have any impact, then we should- no, in fact I would go so far as to accentuate- we NEED to socialize. We need to befriend one another, between organizations, and build lines of communication between each other. This needs to happen for us, since we get paid so damn little that we can’t unionize properly, and when we are put into situations which abandon our rights as workers, or as human beings, we need to know what the norm is, and what we can do about it. This needs to happen for us because we’re tearing out our own hair trying to deal with drama and issues that are beyond our control, and by only having access to the insight of our classroom, our program, or our workshop, these little dramas can become bad-news-bears problems. This needs to happen for us because we’re employed by people who know that we have to do both our day job, and respite care to live a normal adult life, and do not waste effort trying to lead us to further education or job advancements. We need to do this for us, because if we don’t, then no one will.
But we also need to do this for our guys. I dream of a world where we are working in organizations which are watching each others’ backs instead of stabbing them. A place where two big groups might open a special needs friendly adult program in a gym or a pool so that we can share the benefits of having such a resource as a safe place we can bring our participants, and a good place to work on job skills for our participants, and a good place for participants who just really like weight lifting to graduate and spend some time at. I dream of a world that when we find a new volunteer activity that our participants can’t use, we can offer it to a program who might have participants who will. Or, a world where parents can intermingle at leisure and meet people who understand them, who help them to relax and be educated about the laws, so that they don’t get so frustrated that they treat us, or their kids, in a way which would be rational for a person with high frustration but no outlet to act.
I dream of a world where when places like Corner Bakery kick out every member with a disability in an area, we can all gather together and protest the heck out of them. Seriously, that didn’t get any news coverage because we never let it.
What I’m looking for from you:
I want people to post their own opinions in a blog styled format once every two weeks. Why so few? Because I want the expectation to be low enough that you actually have time to do it. If I asked you to make three a week, chances are you will do it for a couple of weeks, and then get busy, and we’ll never hear your opinion again. If you want to write a lot all at once, do it. Sometimes you have a lot to say. But save them and make a buffer for when you’re too stressed and busy to write. Cut up longer posts into sections.
We’ll need to figure out rules for how to post. Clearly we can’t use names, abbreviations, hell, even specific behaviors are like writing a signature. But the point isn’t to write stories about our guys. It’s to write stories about OUR world. There’s a lot of parents, and even a significant group of people who have significant special needs themselves who have written about this subject. What we want is the worker’s position. Thoughts and trials from the people on the ground. The more we build together in places like this blog, the further we can support efforts to get our guys together offline. Throw a para-specific mixer at a horse farm. Plan a meetup or something. I don’t know. Directing that sort of social event is not my strength.
And as for what to post? I’m planning on getting people from all walks. I want to hear from the newbies, who just started. I want to hear from the vets, who have been the captain of the team now for years, without any pay benefit or title change. I want to hear from people who hate their job and people who love it. I want to get the real story from the real people.
And that’s not just because there’s nowhere out there that does it right now, which would make this interesting reading (although that is a plus). It’s because if we want television shows and magazines stop publishing our guys as inspirational heroes… If we want people to know how they can actually help our guys instead of treating them like kids or dogs… If we want to be treated as the drunken rabblerousers that we really are instead of the saints that people think we are… Then we need to change the narrative.
Peace out mah people.
Let me preface this first:
I’ve worked in the special needs field for a number of years now. I’ve been everywhere from pre-K, to post-grad. I’ve seen school districts and non-profits and for profits and special needs specific school districts. I’ve worked with a variety of individuals who have been placed in these programs for a variety of reasons.
I think that what amazes me most about any of this, is the isolation. I’m not just talking for the students, who are looked down on by potential employers, by principals and school boards, by the uninitiated common person… But because of things like the NDA, and these same social stigmas that isolate students, I find that workers, and parents become isolated too. We have no one to turn to on a bad day, feeling locked out of our personal relationships because even our best, most understanding friends make off jokes or crude insights about the field. “Well, Barry, you’ve got a lot of experience in the field because you’ve known my son for so long, har har.” “Your student really is an inspiration because of, you know, the handicap.” Etc. When we don’t feel like we’re being actually watched for infidelity to the NDA- which we are reminded constantly by administrative policy and rhetoric that we are. They tell us ghost stories about a parent who was sitting right behind a loud mouthed para in a bar, and that parent was actually the CEO of literally everything, and then blacklisted the person for life from everything.
I mean, it’s real, and let’s understand this; these are real people, with real feelings, who if we’re making crude jokes or telling our own horror stories in public places, we’re doing some big no-nos toward. But the other side of the story is that we have a lot of people who, through fear of administration, of embarrassment, of unemployment… Are not able to talk to each other.
And let’s face it, this goes way past paraprofessionals talking between organizations. Getting volunteer opportunities for our guys or donors for the organizations that hire us is like a bloody turf war. Instead of building together, we watch out for our own, and burn bridges to keep whats ours, ours. The people who get paid big bucks to build our community together and put a safety net out there for our guys are just as catty as high schoolers or drug warlords.
This is done on a level way larger than us paras have the ability to affect, but I think if we want to have any impact, then we should- no, in fact I would go so far as to accentuate- we NEED to socialize. We need to befriend one another, between organizations, and build lines of communication between each other. This needs to happen for us, since we get paid so damn little that we can’t unionize properly, and when we are put into situations which abandon our rights as workers, or as human beings, we need to know what the norm is, and what we can do about it. This needs to happen for us because we’re tearing out our own hair trying to deal with drama and issues that are beyond our control, and by only having access to the insight of our classroom, our program, or our workshop, these little dramas can become bad-news-bears problems. This needs to happen for us because we’re employed by people who know that we have to do both our day job, and respite care to live a normal adult life, and do not waste effort trying to lead us to further education or job advancements. We need to do this for us, because if we don’t, then no one will.
But we also need to do this for our guys. I dream of a world where we are working in organizations which are watching each others’ backs instead of stabbing them. A place where two big groups might open a special needs friendly adult program in a gym or a pool so that we can share the benefits of having such a resource as a safe place we can bring our participants, and a good place to work on job skills for our participants, and a good place for participants who just really like weight lifting to graduate and spend some time at. I dream of a world that when we find a new volunteer activity that our participants can’t use, we can offer it to a program who might have participants who will. Or, a world where parents can intermingle at leisure and meet people who understand them, who help them to relax and be educated about the laws, so that they don’t get so frustrated that they treat us, or their kids, in a way which would be rational for a person with high frustration but no outlet to act.
I dream of a world where when places like Corner Bakery kick out every member with a disability in an area, we can all gather together and protest the heck out of them. Seriously, that didn’t get any news coverage because we never let it.
What I’m looking for from you:
I want people to post their own opinions in a blog styled format once every two weeks. Why so few? Because I want the expectation to be low enough that you actually have time to do it. If I asked you to make three a week, chances are you will do it for a couple of weeks, and then get busy, and we’ll never hear your opinion again. If you want to write a lot all at once, do it. Sometimes you have a lot to say. But save them and make a buffer for when you’re too stressed and busy to write. Cut up longer posts into sections.
We’ll need to figure out rules for how to post. Clearly we can’t use names, abbreviations, hell, even specific behaviors are like writing a signature. But the point isn’t to write stories about our guys. It’s to write stories about OUR world. There’s a lot of parents, and even a significant group of people who have significant special needs themselves who have written about this subject. What we want is the worker’s position. Thoughts and trials from the people on the ground. The more we build together in places like this blog, the further we can support efforts to get our guys together offline. Throw a para-specific mixer at a horse farm. Plan a meetup or something. I don’t know. Directing that sort of social event is not my strength.
And as for what to post? I’m planning on getting people from all walks. I want to hear from the newbies, who just started. I want to hear from the vets, who have been the captain of the team now for years, without any pay benefit or title change. I want to hear from people who hate their job and people who love it. I want to get the real story from the real people.
And that’s not just because there’s nowhere out there that does it right now, which would make this interesting reading (although that is a plus). It’s because if we want television shows and magazines stop publishing our guys as inspirational heroes… If we want people to know how they can actually help our guys instead of treating them like kids or dogs… If we want to be treated as the drunken rabblerousers that we really are instead of the saints that people think we are… Then we need to change the narrative.
Peace out mah people.
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