Local & State Headlines

Students get a preview of life after high school

• Eighteen Westover High School students will experience college life this weekend thanks to a state program for disabled students.

Joshua Brown

ALBANY — Westover High School will send 18 of its students to Statesboro to participate in the High School High Tech Youth Leadership Forum this weekend as part of a program designed to give disabled students a taste of life after high school, program officials said recently.

Fifty slots were available for high school juniors and seniors to attend the forum statewide, said Janie Worton, high school high tech state coordinator. Officials with Westover were not able to be reached because they have left for summer.

“It’s just a rounded ‘let me show you the world post- secondary/employment opportunity,’ ” Worton said Wednesday.

This year the host for the forum — titled “Dare to Soar 2008” — is Georgia Southern University.

The forum is an initiative of the state Department of Labor Vocational Rehabilitation program, Worton said, that gives rising juniors and seniors ages 14-22 enrolled in the program an opportunity to see what life will be like in post-secondary education or the workplace.

“One of the reasons we do it is to help kids make an informed decision,” she said. The program has been held on college campuses for the last few years, where the youths stay in dorms and eat meals from the colleges’ cafeterias, so its participants can experience college life, she said.

Some of the students attending the forum — which is paid for entirely by the state — are coming for the first time, while others are returning as “peer counselors,” she said.

The forum also has several social activities, such as a swim party, scheduled.

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