Eager to transition to adult life

Small school • Diverse student body
Urban Skills Center enrolls up to 50 secondary students, age 18 to 22, with mild to moderate learning disabilities and mild to moderate problem behaviors. The school educates students from a wide spectrum of special education eligibility.

Autism ● Asperger Syndrome ● ADD/ADHD ● Learning Disabilities ● Medical disorders ● Behavior & Emotional Disabilities

An extension of COOK Education Center and more
Most Urban Skills Center students are educated on contract with San Diego area school districts, each of which establishes course and credit criteria that our students must meet to obtain a high school diploma. Typically, our students transition to us from COOK Education Center, another in the TIEE family of schools, where many have already earned a portion of the credits they need to graduate. Attending COOK Education Center is not a requirement for enrollment in the Urban Skills Center, and, each year, a few students enroll from other public and private schools in the San Diego area.

Common challenges
Urban Skills Center students tend to have good basic communication skills and most have already made some progress toward completing their high school course of study; however, they experience certain common challenges, which makes completing high school and preparing for adult life challenging. They tend to require intensive instruction including many practice opportunities in order to master new skills. Simply being told how to do something is seldom sufficient; demonstrations and guided practice are essential to successful learning. Our students tend to have difficulty communicating when they are asked to do a task that is too hard for them or when they are given a direction they do not understand. Consequently, how to advocate for oneself, including specifying the accommodations needed in order to be successful, is critical to the future success of our students.

The chart below shows the distribution of Urban Skills Center students by age and gender for all students enrolled on October 1, 2008. Students must be at least 18 years of age and no older than 22 in order to attend Urban Skills Center and, as can be seen, no student was outside this range of ages. The student body consisted of ten women (30%) and 23 men (70%).

The next chart reveals that the primary qualifying conditions for special education services for Urban Skills Center students was the presence of emotional problems (SED), autism, health impairments (OHI), and specific learning disabilities (SLD). The pattern was much the same for the 08-09 school year as it had been for the previous two years.