March 19th, 2008 - TV Worldwide

Welcome & Opening Remarks

Hi, good afternoon everybody. My name is Jennifer Sheehy. I'm the Acting
Director for the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation
Research. I want to thank all of you for participating in what we consider
a very, very important opportunity for input from grantees, the public,
stakeholders and those interested in NIDRR's research. I want to induce
Dr. Art Sherwood, our science advisor for NIDRR who helped put all this
together and is leading the long range plan --Endeavor. We will just have
a few remarks from Washington first and some housekeeping. And then we'll
probably go to Cornell University, our first site, a little bit late, 1:30
because we are starting a little bit late. First, let me say we really
look forward to receiving your ideas and this will help us prepare for an
even better future for disability research.
As many of you know, the mission of NIDRR is to generate new knowledge and
promote effective use to improve the abilities of peoples with disabilities
to perform activities of their choice in the community and also to expand
society's capacity to provide full opportunities and accommodations for its
citizens with disabilities. NIDRR has a long history of accomplishments
and disability in rehabilitation research. It's critical that we build on
those accomplishments and focus our resources to really have the greatest
impact in order to achieve the goal of improving outcomes for people with
disabilities. We have decided, with our long range plan to focus our
resources on where we can have the greatest impact and that is in the
critical area of employment for people with disabilities. To that aim we
will stress the link of NIDRR's research to the elimination of employment
barriers. What that means though is that we plan to investigate a broad
range of needs in areas such as health and function, rehabilitation,
participation, policy and workplace and workforce issues that can and
should be addressed in our efforts to generate research based knowledge to
help people with disabilities achieve high quality employment outcomes.
NIDRR maintains a strong interest and commitment to its historical mission
and portfolio research, and we are striving to make it even better by
showing its relevancy to its constituents. What that means is that we are
not replacing NIDRR's previous research, for example, medical
rehabilitation research. We just believe that we can make a strong case
for a link to improving employment outcomes with our research, including
medical research.
Let me go through some of our procedures for today's public input and
webcast. We have a half an hour per site. Teleconference and E-mail
remarks will be voiced as time permits for those of you that are on the
call and are E-mailing your remarks. Please limit your remarks to NIDRR's
research agenda. We'll not respond to remarks during the video conference
to individual comments. Local moderators at the sites are responsible for
watching the time of commenters, one to two minutes per Respondent,
depending on how many you have at your site.
When the time has elapsed for your particular site we'll let you know. And
for the sites, please be prepared 15 minutes before your scheduled time,
and be prepared to run over about 15 minutes. We want to try to
accommodate the very strong response we've had. All E-mail input will be
included in the transcript of this teleconference and webcast, whether or
not it is voiced.
You may also watch the webcast or view the webcast, archived, which will be
posted by Monday. If you would like to watch the webcast you can go to the
main link where you will have links to the webcast and that link is
neweditions.net\NIDRR LRP. You can give us your written comments by web
also at that same web address. You can E-mail to NIDRR-mailbox at Ed.gov.
You can get a transcript by going back to the webcast link. and view the
archive webcast. One thing to mention is that the webcast is about a half
a minute delayed from the video conference teleconference. And we
encourage you to present your remarks by E-mail. If you are viewing the
webcast and you wish to voice a remark, please be sure to turn down the
audio from the webcast and remember the teleconference is about 30 seconds
ahead of the webcast.

Washington D.C.

Jennifer Sheehy: All right. We are going to begin with some guests that we
have in Washington. And then we'll move on to Cornell. First I want to
introduce Carl Sueder with the council for state administrators of
vocational rehabilitation who has joined us in-person today. Carl. Dr.
Sueder: Thank you very much Jennifer and Tim and Art for putting on this
video conference and webcast which I think will be most productive in terms
of soliciting comments. The vocational rehabilitation program is
celebrating its 88th birthday this year. While the program has enabled
countless individuals with disabilities to become employed, the 80
vocational rehabilitation programs throughout the United States and its
territories recognize that much more needs to be done to help eliminate the
disparity in the employment rate between non-disabled and potential workers
with disabilities. In the 88 years of our program there's been precious
little evidence based research as to what practices actually are useful in
enabling persons with disabilities to become employed. CSADR is delighted
that the research and the renewed interest that NIDRR is demonstrating in
its long range planning relating to employment. As was noted in the NIDRR
long range plan for many people with disabilities, employment that is
challenging, fulfilling and fairly and adequately compensated is the
ultimate rehabilitation outcome. Research on employment of people with
disabilities can be used to strengthen the scientific basis of disability
related employment policy and practice. As NIDRR moves more boldly into
the employment arena and research on new and improved interventions,
products, devices and environmental adaptations through evidence-based
practices, it is imperative that NIDRR recognizes that is this kind of
research is inevitably more costly but that the outcomes of the research
will undoubtedly be of much greater benefit. Thank you. Jennifer Sheehy:
Thank you very much, Carl. Marianne Vessels. Marrianne Vessels: Good
afternoon, my name is Marianne Vessels and I'm the director of the DIBTAC,
mid Atlantic ADA Information Center. I'm one of 10 regional centers funded
by NIDRR to provide technical assistance on the Americans with Disabilities
Act. As region centers we provide incredibly in-depth, personnel
information to individuals and those covered by the Americans with
disabilities act. We feel that research that we are doing currently under
our last cycle of funding from NIDRR will implement a tremendous number of
resources to people with disabilities and their communities. We are an
excellent source of knowledge dissemination and utilization practices
within the field. The Americans with disabilities act has the ability to
enhance community living and employment opportunities. The DIBTAC provides
that great link of information, resources, technical assistance and
materials to those covered by the law. Our research that we are currently
providing will give us substantial information that can provide an
important link to people, and important documentation to prove the ability
of people to live in their communities and to become employed. Research on
our large data set will allow us to build and utilize those community
connections across the country. We would encourage the use of are data set
on a national as well as regional basis to encourage the employment of
people with disabilities. The DIBTACs are an excellent vehicle to
disseminate other NIDRR grantees information or research outcomes. We look
forward to moving with NIDRR as they move forward to further increasing
research and the ability of people with disabilities to move into their
communities. Jennifer Sheehy: Thank you very much Marrianne. And Marie, is
it Pitowski? Marie: Pikaski, Marie Pikaski: Thank you I'm very happy to be
here. I am very happy to meet you. I didn't know you were going to be
here. This is great. I'm a parent of a child with muscular dystrophy. He
is 25 years old. And NIDRR is funding research in neuro-muscular diseases
at UC Davis. And I understand that with the new priorities that have been
set that the research that they have been doing, UC Davis, is not going to
be renewed. There is -- it is not up for renewal and there will be no
neuro-muscular disease research, rehabilitation research. And that you,
NIDRR, are the only ones that do it in the U.S. And I think it would be a
real shame, because they are in the middle of this research that -- I don't
know how to explain it, but it is like a Registry almost of people with
muscular dystrophy. And I think, I know I'm really bad at this. But I am
here to say, please keep that in your priorities and please, fund UC Davis.
Jennifer Sheehy: Marie, thank you very much for your comments and thank you
for being here in-person.

Cornell University

Jennifer Sheehy: That is it for the commentors that we have in Washington.
So we are going to go to Cornell University now. And Suzanne Brier. Thank
you very much Cornell for hosting this site, our first site. And thank you
personally, Suzanne. Appreciate your help with this. Suzanne Brier: You
are quite welcome. Thank you for the opportunity. We are delighted to be
included in this event and looking forward to the comments of our
colleagues. We have with us about 10 or 12 people today who are staff of
the employment and disability institute. We are pretty focused in our
target audience as you caught us on spring break. So many of our
colleagues are in warmer environments than Ithaca (NY) including our
students, we have a very active disability student group who we hoped to
recrui