Project SEARCH opens doors to employment

From the Nashua Telegraph:

In Nashua, New Hampshire, Project SEARCH is helping students with cognitive and physical disabilities find jobs. The program boosts employment for people with disabilities by offering a total immersion school-to-work program.

All five of the graduates this year, including 21-year-old Noelle Hogan (left), are now working in the medical field. Hogan cleans and sterilizes patient rooms, makes copies, assembles packets of forms, and is preparing to use her photography skills for wound documentation.

“We keep adding more and more responsibilities because she’s extremely focused,” said Dinny D’Anjou, a podiatry nurse who supervises Hogan. “Our motto is that she doesn’t have disabilities. She has different abilities. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

Across the state, only 43 percent of working age people with disabilities were working in 2007, compared with 84 percent of their peers without disabilities.

http://www.cincinnatichildrens.org/svc/alpha/p/search/