One Chicago Public Schools teacher has helped bridge this experience for his students.

Justin O’Donnell, a diverse learning instructor at Lincoln Park High School (LPHS), began an internship program working with several community agencies and small businesses to easily bridge the workplace from high school for his students with intellectual disabilities.

DePaul’s Ray Meyer Fitness Center is one the internship hosts.

O’Donnell grew up helping around his mother’s own special education classroom and went on to earn his master’s degree in special education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to focus on helping the young adult population.

“I found myself wanting to help everybody and make sure everyone was progressing,” O’Donnell said. “I found myself motivated to learn and have never felt that motivated to learn about anything in my life. And that led me to pursue a masters and hopefully in the future to keep pursuing research in this field.”

After grad school, O’Donnell tried to apply these lessons to LPHS. His goal was to find somewhere nearby to host the program.

“DePaul was the first place we reached out [to], Danielle was right on board and once we got all the paperwork figured out and we got the students to start working there,” O’Donnell said.

The program was put on pause when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in the spring of 2020.

Danielle Arens, the assistant director of fitness at DePaul’s Ray Meyer Fitness Center, said that the internship was able to restart in the fall.

“[The students] really seem to love their experience; they are always smiling,” Arens said.

Students who joined in 2020 were able to return.

“We had one student come back who was with us before the pandemic and he was ecstatic, he remembered me and the facility and could not wait to be a part of the Ray again,” Arens said. “They feel a sense of belonging to our team.

“I know that they have not missed one day, I have never gotten a call from their aid saying that they could not make it.They’re always here consistently so that must mean that they’re looking forward to it and we’re doing something right.”

Christy Thai, a Ray staff member who helps the Lincoln Park students with tasks like folding and organizing towels, said that they were able to have extracurricular activities that provide real job experience.

“It gives them an enjoyable experience outside of school just to be doing something else,” Thai said.

O’Donnell said one of the strategies that he and his team take is to train their students in retaining information through repetition of activities that mirror their internship work sites.

“The whole goal is working in an environment with a lot of help and not a lot of distractions and a lot of repetition here at LP and then taking all those skills and seeing again if they can generalize those skills to those real-world settings,” O’Donnell said.

O’Donnell has seen the benefits of this experiential learning in one student in particular.  . The biggest progression O’Donnell has seen in this student  is his communication skills.

“His communication has gotten so much better throughout the time that I have known him,” O’Donnell said. “He has an augmentative and alternative communication device that he carries around. Before I got here, he did not even have it and now he has mastered it.”

Students can learn social skills at the internship such as greeting people and socializing with guests.

“[The student ] is great at greeting people, which is a really great work skill for him, and socializing is something he has really gotten motivated by,” O’Donnell said.

These skills are often used for preliminary job interviews.

“If a student lacks those communication skills, it can be tough for that employer to hire them based on that generic interview process that they tend to do,” O’Donnell said.

Even with the progress they have made, O’Donnell faces other challenges in finding suitable work sites for his students. O’Donnell strives to ensure that potential internship sites are reliable and play to his students’ strengths.

“We need to know that we are sending our students to a trustworthy site after Lincoln Park, making sure our students are ready for work,” O’Donnell said. “It can be difficult finding agencies that are best for specific students because some agencies are good for higher functioning students and others for lower functioning students.”

O’Donnell is thankful to DePaul, PAWS Humane Society and a local diner that have all taken in his students allowing them to get work experience.

“Our students are great workers and when given the chance through these internships, perhaps they can get employed through them when that internship is over,” he said.