Aggie ACHIEVE program receives $2.2 million grant

In its second year, Texas A&M’s Aggie ACHIEVE program has received a $2.2 million federal grant that will help fund the program and its expansion over the next five years.

Aggie ACHIEVE (Academic Courses in Higher Inclusive Education and Vocational Experiences) is a four-year residential post-secondary program for young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The college students attend classes on campus — online in many cases this semester due to the coronavirus pandemic — and live in on-campus apartments together.

The program began last fall and currently has 12 students — five sophomores and seven freshmen. At full capacity, program founder and faculty director Carly Gilson said, Aggie ACHIEVE anticipates serving 40 to 48 students. The program plans to accept about 10 students for the next couple years, and then 12 students the year after that.

The Transition and Postsecondary Programs for Students with Intellectual Disabilities grant, which began in 2010 and is awarded every five years by the U.S. Department of Education, will help with that growth, Gilson said.

In addition to providing Aggie ACHIEVE with between $400,000 and $500,000 each year, she said, the five-year grant also puts the program in a nationwide network with more than two dozen other university programs where they will meet annually to discuss how things are going and collaborate with each other.

“We’re still relatively new. It’s only our second year, but I hope that this grant will just be like a catalyst for even bigger things in the future,” Gilson said. “To see that investment, both the monetary investment as well as the acknowledgement, like, ‘Hey, we want you to keep doing what you’re doing,’ is really inspiring.”

With the grant, she said, the program team hopes to expand its capacity on campus, establish more partnerships with community businesses, provide free professional development for teachers at public schools in the state and expand programs like Aggie ACHIEVE.

The professional development, Gilson said, would be less about how to prepare students to get into Aggie ACHIEVE specifically and more how to help prepare them for success after high school and be a competitive applicant if they want to enroll in Aggie ACHIEVE or a similar program at another university.

Gilson said her goal in establishing community partnerships is that local business owners will see the value in hiring Aggie ACHIEVE students and, in general, people with disabilities.

“It’s not an act of charity; it’s not something to do for tax purposes,” she said. “It is because it’s good for business, and that’s a really strong case that we want to make to them.”

Her goal is that if a business is unsure about hiring an Aggie ACHIEVE student, they can take steps to become more comfortable by participating in the program’s job and interview fairs and hiring a student for an internship.

“We know that if somebody’s hesitant, they’re not going to just go straight to hiring, so we want to be able to offer different ways to get involved before that,” she said.

To help achieve these goals, she said, they plan to add at least one new staff member each year of the grant. These new positions would include people who will focus on research and evaluation of the program, establishing community partnerships and expanding on-campus opportunities for students, and training university staff who want to have more inclusive classes. The program currently uses graduate assistants to help in some of this work, Gilson said, but the jobs are better served by full-time staff members.

Gilson said Aggie ACHIEVE is exploring how the grant can help expand similar programs to other universities in Texas, especially those in the Texas A&M University System.

“We recognize that there’s a real need for programs like Aggie ACHIEVE in Texas, so we want to be a leader in serving other schools, particularly in Texas, but not limited to Texas, and helping them figure out from ground zero, how do I start a program,” she said.

Ultimately, she said, she would like to see a statewide network in which universities throughout Texas can work together and support each other.