Available Online! Tapping into Potential: Employment & Education for People with Disabilities

UMaine Alert

Posted: April 19, 2024 - 1:32 PM

At approximately 9:24 a.m. on Friday, April 19, a University of Maine graduate student was struck by a university vehicle on Long Road at the University of Maine campus in Orono. The student reports that they are at a local hospital with minor injuries.

Emergency services, including the Orono Fire Department, University Volunteer Ambulance Corps, University of Maine Police Department, Orono Police Department and Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office responded to the scene.

The university vehicle involved in the incident was a Chevrolet Express van. It was being operated by a university employee.

Counseling services and support are available for students, faculty or staff who may have been affected. The Counseling Center can be reached at 207-581-1392 and the Dean of Students Office can be reached at 207-581-1406.

The scene has been cleared and Long Road is now accessible. An investigation is being conducted by the University of Maine Police Department with assistance from the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office Crash Reconstruction Unit. Any witnesses to the incident are encouraged to contact Lt. Noel Santiago at noel.santiago@maine.edu.

April 10, 2019 CCIDS News

On November 8, 2018, Dr. Kelly Nye-Lengerman (pictured above), a research associate at the University of Minnesota Institute on Community Integration delivered the conference keynote for “Equity, Access and Inclusion: A World Usability Day Event” at the University of Maine. A captioned recording of Dr. Nye-Lengerman’s keynote is now available for viewing on the CCIDS YouTube channel.

In her address, Tapping into Potential with Expectations: Making Employment and Post-Secondary Education the New Norm for Individuals with Disabilities, Dr. Nye-Lengerman discussed how large numbers of people with disabilities can’t access the typical trajectory for economic well-being. “We invest a lot of money. We have a lot of policies that support inclusion or prioritize inclusion. What is it about our educational settings or employment settings that are not making these spaces available or accessible to people with disabilities?”

Nye-Lengerman identified six steps to address these disparities:

Full inclusion: Make education and employment the new normal. Pursue, support and vigorously defend inclusion for all people.
Language of expectations: Raise expectations and use words that convey positivity and expectation.
Presuming competence: People with disabilities can be successful in post‑secondary education and employment.
Power of experiences: Human beings need experiences, the willingness to try, opportunities to take risk, and a little bit of failure to develop self‑awareness. Offer the same experiences in education and employment to people with disabilities.
Starting early: Invest in the social‑emotional development of young children and family support.
Universal design for learning: Make classroom spaces universal so everyone benefits from the different styles of learning students have, with different types of assignments that measure knowledge, skill and ability.

Dr. Nye-Lengerman’s keynote was sponsored by the University of Maine Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies (CCIDS). Her summary points above are also available as a handout (PDF).

Established in 2005, World Usability Day is a single day that occurs annually around the world and brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen, and government groups to promote the values of usability, accessibility, and universal design to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.

The University of Maine World Usability Day event was coordinated by the University of Maine Office of Student Accessibility Services. In addition to CCIDS, other partners included the University of Maine Division of Student Life, Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, and the Virtual Environment and Multimodal Interaction (VEMI) Laboratory.