Confronting the ‘High School Cliff’: What Young Adults with Disabilities Need to Succeed: Parents, Advocates Battle Confusing Systems That Delay Future Success
Kim Riley featured in KCPT news segment
Kim Riley is featured in an in-depth news report on KCPT’s Flatland show. The segment focuses on parents’ frustrations about the lack of supports for youth who are transitioning out of school and into adult life. Here is an excerpt from the story:
Gerald Mitchell, 17, is happiest around his cousins, playing Mario Kart and being in the kitchen.
Gerald, who was diagnosed with autism at 2 years old, is timid and soft-spoken.But he is quick to respond when asked what kind of food he likes to make.
“Pizza,” he said.
What’s your favorite kind of pizza?
“Um, pepperoni,” he said with a half-smile.
His mom Michelle thumbs through a stack of special education documents from school.
Their busy schedules make planning for Gerald’s future complicated. Michelle gets up before dawn to get to her full-time warehouse job at 7 a.m. Her husband Gregory is a construction worker, so he’s out early in the mornings and at times late into the evening.
But they feel as if they’re running out of time. Gerald will graduate from high school this year, and now more than ever Michelle and Gregory are focused on preparing their son for adulthood.
The article goes on to interview Kim about how The Transition Academy helps families like these and why she founded TTA:
Then the family met Kim Riley.
Riley is a fellow parent of a young adult with a disability and the CEO of The Transition Academy, a nonprofit that serves youth with disabilities with their career and job prospects. Her experiences matched theirs.
When Flatland first met her in 2018, Riley was facing hurdle after hurdle.
“The disability world is very unnecessarily complicated,” Riley said. “It’s very word of mouth.”
Her son Kendall is now in his early 20s, standing tall at about 6’3″. He has limited verbal skills. Shortly after graduation in 2019, he had a behavioral outburst and was detained — “handcuffed, shackled and muzzled,” Riley said — at a local day program intended to teach him social and soft skills.
Arrests and disciplinary measures are more common among youth with disabilities, a recent study shows.
Riley said this is not OK.
In 2018, she filed a civil rights complaint, sounding the alarm on inequities in her son’s special education class in the Raytown School District. She persisted. As recently as last fall, she presented to the Kansas City Public Schools board about the roadblocks students with Individualized Educational Plans (IEPs) and 504 plans face from the special education department when trying to access employment and college training.
The existing system was not cutting it.
So, in 2019 she founded The Transition Academy — a resource she wished existed for her son years ago.
In the four years since, Riley has become a compass for many families like the Mitchells who are drowning in a confusing patchwork of information. She advocates for her own son or provides spaces for other families, particularly Black families, who fear for their child’s safety and future.
You can read the rest of the article here: https://flatlandkc.org/news-issues/education/confronting-the-high-school-cliff-what-young-adults-with-disabilities-need-to-succeed/