Twenty-Four Months After High School

Abstract

The author located students with severe emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) who had been assigned to separate day schools with partial hospitalization treatment facilities because their public school programs did not sufficiently meet their needs, then conducted interviews at 3, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months postsecondary school as part of a large 5-year study of factors influencing the transition process for students with serious emotional disturbance (SED).The findings were consistent with those from previous reports on the employment and schooling participation rates of students with EBD despite the fact that this sample had more severe disabilities and were educated in more restrictive environments than most previously reported samples of students with SED/EBD. Most revealing, however, were the unstable employment and schooling patterns of individual participants over the course of the 2 years of the study, which were illustrated by their career paths after high school.The author speculates as to whether it is appropriate to judge the success of school programs by the long-term outcomes for former students with SED/EBD in their adult worlds.