New Transitions Center

Our programs support those members of the community with a higher need who cannot be accepted into a vocational program and want to continue to focus on learning and growing their life skills after finishing high school. The Center offers structured daily programs, special events and community-based field trips, that address the unmet needs of this community. We are the first in Roanoke but we hope to not be the only as a recent article posted by the local ABC affiliate WFAA highlighted the significant need of these individuals:

“More than 155,000 families of people with intellectual disabilities are currently on 10-year or more wait lists to receive help from the state of Texas to support therapy and critical needs.”

The New Transition Center is striving to meet those needs locally and serve as a model that can be replicated across the state.

The Center supports young adults with varying degrees of intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities. Several individuals in the program need assistance with ambulation and personal hygiene. As The Center serves those that have a more profound need we strive to maintain a 1:4 staff to participant ratio to ensure quality programming and care for participants. Social interaction and community engagement are some of the biggest challenges for this population due to their significant needs and safe transportation for those with mobility issues poses a challenge for our program. The Center offers community based engagement to provide safe and consistent interaction and life skills for participants.

We offer daily programming Monday - Friday with various membership options. Our community outings and special events are scheduled throughout the month and we hold fundraising engagements periodically during the year. The Center tracks individual goals using a protected electronic record system - Therap. Each participant's progress on individual goals are recorded as well as daily activity logs. Quarterly meetings with participant parents review progress and programming is adjusted to accommodate changes in individual goals. Program staff are supported by a volunteer Clinical Expert and Advisory Committee that meets quarterly to review and contribute to activities and strategies to improve educational programming.

We strive to maintain a 1:4 ratio of staff to participants to ensure safe, high quality engagement with participants. The Center can accommodate up to 6 participants per group session in the current space and we are looking to expand our facility to triple capacity by 2021. In May 2020 we received a grant from The Heart Space Initiative to purchase a community vehicle that is handicap accessible and will provide access to increased community activities and programming at The Center.

In Jan 2020 The Center opened its doors to families in need. We had an inaugural group consisting of 4 memberships and two staff. Due to the COVID19 crisis we temporarily closed our program Mid March 2020 and plan to reopen June 1, 2020. During our hiatus we have focused on staff development, participant recruitment and fundraising. We received a grant from The Heart Space Initiative to purchase a community vehicle that is handicap accessible and will safely accommodate our participants. We plan to purchase the vehicle by end of Summer 2020 and hope to build out our community outing activities once it is safe to do so. We also plan to move forward with an expansion project to increase the physical capacity of out facility space. We currently have a 1500 sq. ft facility and are limited in our capacity. Moving forward in this space it is important that we practice social distancing therefore our capacity is even more limited. Therefore, as a Board we decided to fast track fundraising to expand the space. We are hoping that by Spring 2021 we will have tripled our capacity by expanding the facility an additional 2000 sq. ft.