The Lighthouse Monthly Newsletter

STAR: a System of Technology to Achieve Results is a Minnesota Assistive Technology project designed to support individuals with disabilities and their families with assistive technology (AT) knowledge, exploration, and short term AT loans.

STAR project website: https://mn.gov/admin/star/

Other resources that you can learn more about at the STAR project website:

• Assistive Technology online lending library: MN.AT4all.com
• Minnesota Guide to Assistive Technology: https://mn.gov/admin/at/
• Device loans - try before you buy AT: https://mn.gov/admin/star/program-services/device-loan/

Greetings from Vocational Rehabilitation Services (VRS)!

Did you know that VRS has resources to support students to support individuals with disabilities to find services that can help them live independently?

Find more information: VRS Living Independently

At Focus Beyond, we strive to help all students gain a deeper understanding of and passion for life-long learning. To accomplish that goal, we rely on community partnerships and the expertise and experience of our staff. Our students quickly learn that there are many training and career preparation opportunities in addition to college.

Today, the focus is: Minneapolis Community & Technical College (MCTC).

On the MCTC website, the college is described as follows:

WHERE YOU WANT TO GO IN LIFE

Minneapolis College is where you can map out your future. We provide an education designed to take you to the places you want to go in life. We offer affordable pathways to high-quality degrees, diplomas, certificates and more. You’ll engage with the world through a diverse lens, while drawing on our supportive learning environment.

In the past, we have had several students from Focus Beyond take classes at MCTC. Many of our students selected MCTC because they have many programs in DESIGN AND THE ARTS. For example, MCTC offers Apparel Technologies, Cinema, Graphic Design, Digital and Print Media, Music, Photography and Motion, Sound Arts and Theatre Arts.

We’ve had Focus Beyond students attend MCTC as PSEO students, but that requires a high school GPA of 2.5 or higher. Others have attended MCTC after leaving Focus Beyond.

Recently, a small group of Focus Beyond students visited MCTC using the city bus. Although it is a three-bus trip from Focus Beyond, the travel time was less than an hour.

If you have further questions, please contact Craig Olsen at craig.olsen@spps.org

Each month we focus in on core words. Core words are the words we use the most to talk about lots of things with lots of people.

For the month of December it's all about giving compliments.

Students can use speech, sign language, or communication devices for messages such as:

-Thank you

-I like.

-I see.

-Who?

Our team is on the grow!

We are excited to add a members to our Focus Beyond team!

Our current open positions include:

-Educational Assistant - Job Coach

-Educational Assistant - Classroom

To apply for open positions or to share our openings with others visit https://www.spps.org/careers and search for Focus Beyond.

Email Dr. Kelly Dietrich at kelly.dietrich@spps.org with questions about open positions.

Prefer a language other than English? You can open the newsletter link and click a button on the right (on a computer) or at the bottom (on a mobile device) to have it translated into many different languages. Please know that the translation function may be inaccurate or incomplete. If you have any questions, please call us at 651-293-5997.

SPANISH

¿Prefiere un idioma que no sea inglés? Puede abrir el enlace del boletín y hacer clic en el botón a la derecha (en una computadora) o en la parte inferior (en un dispositivo móvil) para traducirlo a muchos idiomas diferentes. Tenga en cuenta que la función de traducción puede ser inexacta o incompleta. Si tiene alguna pregunta, llámenos al 651-293-5997.

SOMALI

Ma waxaad doorbideysaa luuqad aan aheyn af-Ingiriis? Waxaad furi kartaa lifaaqa wargeysyada oo guji batoonka midigta (ee kumbiyuutarkaaga) ama xagga hoose (ee taleefankaaga gacanta) si aad wargeyska ugu tarjuntid luuqado badan oo kala duwan. Fadlan ogow in natiijada turjumaaddu ay noqon karto mid aan sax ahayn ama aan dhammaystirnayn. Haddii aad wax su'aalo ah qabtid, fadlan naga soo wac 651-293-5997.

HMONG

Puas xav tau ua lwm hom lus? Nej qhib txoj kab mus rau hauv daim ntawv xov xwm thiab nias lub pob ntawm sab xis hauv lub koos pis tawj, los sis yog lwm hom twj no ces nyob hauv qab, ces yuav muaj txhais ua ntau hom lus. Nco ntsoov tias cov lus txhais no yuav tsis raug txhua lo los sis txhais tiav tiav. Yog nej muaj lus nug, thov hu rau peb ntawm 651-293-5997.

KAREN

ကျိာ်ဂုၤဂၤတခါလၢနအဲၣ်ဒိးအီၤ လၢအတမ့ၢ် အဲကလံးကျိာ်န့ၣ်အိၣ်ဧါ. နအိးထီၣ်ကွၢ်လံာ်တၢ်ကစီၣ်ပှာ်ဘျးစဲ ဒီးစံၢ်လီၤဖဲ ပှာ်ဘျးစဲအဖီခိၣ်ဖဲစုထွဲတကပၤ(လၢခီၣ်ဖၠူထၢၣ်ဖီခိၣ်) မ့တမ့ၢ် စံၢ်လီၤဖဲတၢ်ဖီလာ် (လၢနလီတဲစိ ဖီခိၣ်) ဒ်သိး တၢ်ကကွဲးကျိာ်ထံအီၤလၢကျိာ်အဂုၤအဂၤအဂီၢ်သ့ဝဲဒၣ်န့ၣ်လီၤ. ဝံသးစူၤသ့ၣ်ညါလၢ လံာ်လၢ တၢ်ကွဲးကျိာ်ထံအီၤန့ၣ် ကအိၣ်ဝဲဒီး တၢ်အကမၣ် မ့တမ့ၢ် တၢ်တလၢတပှဲၤသ့ဝဲဒၣ်န့ၣ်လီၤ. နမ့ၢ်အိၣ်ဒီး တၢ်သံကွၢ်တဖၣ်န့ၣ်, ဝံသးစူၤကိးပှၤဖဲ 651-293-5997 န့ၣ်တက့ၢ်.