The ARRIVE Program: Offering a Brighter Future for the IDD Community

• By School of Health Professions
• April 3, 2025
• Education

In Fall 2024, a TTUHSC faculty project team was approved for a $10,000 SHP seed grant to pilot and evaluate a program inspired by the findings of a comprehensive community needs assessment to build Lubbock’s capacity for meeting the needs of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) who are transitioning from school-supports to early adulthood life roles. 

The ARRIVE Program stands for Advocating for Relevant and Rewarding Inclusion in Vocation and Education. This program provides a supported work context integrated within the TTUHSC Occupational Therapy Department (OTD) for young adults (age 18 – 29) with IDD to gain the necessary skills that facilitate an effective transition from school to early adulthood. 

The program team consists of the ARRIVE program’s project lead, Laurie Stelter, OTR, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Doctoral Capstone Coordinator for the OTD Program, and the program’s co-investigators, Cynthia Tiongco, OTR, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Assistant Program Director for the OTD Program, and Hesper Holland, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Assistant Professor and Assistant Program Director in the Speech-language pathology Program. Fellow co-investigator, Sarah Roundtree, Ph.D., CRC, Assistant Professor and Program Director for the Master’s of Clinical Rehabilitation Counseling Program, later joined the project team during the QIRB phase.

The ARRIVE Program began operations in January 2025 with three participants who serve in their work role as an ARRIVE Program Assistant, each working approximately ten hours per week for the 2025 calendar year. Consistent with the work context, they are reimbursed for their efforts from budgeted grant funds. They engage in a variety of meaningful and productive job tasks such as environmental upkeep, organization of classroom spaces, set-up and take-down of classroom/lab activities, assistance with learning activities, and student wellness projects. They also periodically fulfill work requests for other programs within the School of Health Professions. They receive any needed scaffolded supports from an assigned student that serves as a job coach. The student job coach serves as a peer support, implements the program protocol, and documents the participant outcomes.

The current job coaches (or peer supports) for the program are Payton Pustejovsky and Ashley Twombly, both OTD capstone students.

We sat down with the ARRIVE team to discuss the program, their plans and hopes for the future, and the success of the program thus far.  

The Team & Their Why

Dr. Stelter, Dr. Tiongco and Dr. Holland spent nearly two years discussing their interest in finding ways to support IDD individuals. 

“In terms of IDD individuals no longer being in school, we wondered about their next steps and opportunities for access to meaningful, purposeful and health-enhancing opportunities,” says Dr. Tiongco. 

“The idea of the program really grew out of that, and we knew we wanted it to have an interdisciplinary perspective because many other professionals also target the needs of this population,” says Dr. Stelter. Once the team had the opportunity in the spring of 2024, they executed a needs assessment with the help of capstone student, Macy Barnard, which they say helped secure seed grant funding. 

Capstone students and job coaches (peer supports), Pustejovsky and Twombly, both have capstone projects focused on supporting the population in different ways. 

“My capstone is based around strength training for the population, and so I saw a good opportunity for me to interact with the population through what Macy was helping to build,” Twombly says. “But I feel like we've been super lucky because the program is really blossoming this year, and we’ve been able to help carry that out.

“My capstone is centered more broadly on that transition to adulthood for the IDD population, so I became more interested in that throughout the OT program,” Pustejovsky says. “I, too, saw the gap that the population faces after leaving high school, so it's been a really great opportunity to dive in this semester.”

For Dr. Roundtree, her research focuses on increasing accessibility and inclusion of higher education for individuals with disabilities across the board. She previously worked in an inclusive post-secondary education program where she gained a passion for supporting the IDD population through her work. Now, she’s bringing her passion and research together for the ARRIVE program. 

 

 

The Impact

Within the first eight weeks of programming, there is quantitative evidence to support the positive impact for participants and their families. This trending evidence includes progress toward individual performance goals in the areas of technical work skills, communication skills, and independent living skills, as well as increased access to health-enhancing resources. All qualitative feedback from participants and their families has been incredibly positive. 

The impact for the job coaching (peer support) team has been just as positive. Pustejovsky and Twombly say they have experienced great benefit in learning from the program’s participants, gaining skills on the best ways to work alongside them and to support their growth. The pair says the opportunity has even been beneficial for their fellow students who get to interact with these individuals socially and have even been able to connect with them in patient scenarios. 

“Payton and Ashley are able to show how you can be exceptionally respectful of another adult in learning, but still provide necessary cues,” says Dr. Tiongco. “The occupational therapy students who are in the classroom are getting valuable insight into person-centered care and the ability to recognize someone's individuality even as they need support.”

From a practical perspective, the work of the Program Assistants has contributed a significant improvement to environmental upkeep (i.e., cleanliness and organization), efficiency in delivering learning activities, enhancement of outreach activities, and advancement of programmatic projects (e.g., updated inventory system; new student wellness initiatives) reducing the burden of these activities from faculty and staff. Within a few weeks they have successfully completed over ten substantial special project request work orders.  

The Research

The ARRIVE Program is advancing research capacity. The active data collection that is occurring is anticipated to yield a replicable intervention protocol, publishable works, and future studies with elevated rigor. Through a community-engaged research approach, the team will be eligible to pursue grant funding specific to such efforts.

In terms of research, Dr. Stelter says the main outcomes that are currently being gathered are primarily related to participant related outcomes, including improvement and work skills, social interaction skills or communication skills, and areas of independent living. She says they are even evaluating the level of quality participation in meaningful community activities. 

“So we’re not only looking at what they're doing here, but we're also connecting our participants with other resources,” says Dr. Stelter. “For example, we've been able to connect one participant with an opportunity at Texas Tech's Therapeutic Riding Center and another participant with some vocational services like the Texas Workforce Commission.” 

The Future

The program has formed a 21-person community advisory board with representation across IDD service agencies, school systems, service providers and educators, healthcare providers, and families and individuals with lived experience. The ARRIVE team views their position and role in the community as a resource with open arms, ready to bring their individual expertise. They have received a significant level of engagement and participation from the advisory board, working together to create a strategic plan with actionable, collaborative steps for the future focused on building Lubbock's capacity for addressing the needs of this population.

But Dr. Stelter says the sustainability of the program is top of mind, as the team has intentions for this program to be sustainable providing a supported-paid work role within the TTUHSC setting. With that, she says they are actively seeking funding sources for long-term solutions, including other grants and advocating for an internally funded grant that would come out of program budgets.

Ultimately though, she says the team hopes to serve as a model program, expanding these types of opportunities to other college settings or at other universities, or even within the Lubbock community.

“Part of our long-term vision is that this is just a piece of helping our community understand the value that individuals with IDD can provide and assisting them in becoming more active in the community through these different supported opportunities,” says Dr. Tiongco. “There are great programs already in place, but it’s about accessing them and pulling them together to see how we can continue to bridge those gaps for this population and community.”