LafayetteHigh School Podcast
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Welcome to the TransQUAL online monthly podcast, “In Their Own Words.” Each month CornellUniversity’s Employment and Disability Institute profiles people dedicated to a process of collaboration and innovation - advancing student post school outcomes in living, learning, and earning. To learn more about TransQUAL online, go to
And now, this month’s profile.
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I’m Tom Turner. I’m a teacher at LafayetteHigh School. I currently have several different programs going on, wearing probably more hats than I should be at this point in time, but so far so good. Through my teaching experiences and opportunities here at Lafayette I have been able to make what I think are solid connections with kids. My program at Lafayette High School consists of a consultant teacher and resource room model where by students are serviced both in their classes and in the resource room in a removed setting.
That’s one element that’s my main program here, but within that I guess I call them support programs. One of which is the Youth Construction Program entitled YCIP. It’s a state program funded through the Department of Transportation here in New York. Excellent program. We’re one of nine sites across the state that has the program on campus.
Another program I’m involved with at the school level here is the outdoor education program. I’m the advisor for it. That’s a program where students can explore outdoor careers via outdoor education activities. The main focus takes place in our outdoor classroom which is a 50 acre site that the school has use of. It was donated by the town of Lafayette in 1994 and several of my students participate in the outdoor education program at the outdoor classroom site. And again it’s a non traditional hands-on learning opportunity that many of my LD students and resource room really find their niche in and it taps into their learning style which in their case is hands-on.
My program-the outdoor education piece of my program, including the use of the outdoor classroom-has grown by leaps and bounds. It started out as just a site where I could take a group of outdoor education students on a field trip to maybe do some more orienteering activities or work on a fund raiser or we might cut firewood and sell it to district employees – those are a couple of examples. To its current state which now we take in the area of 30 field trips a year down to the outdoor classroom with kids from all three buildings K to 12. That would be the Grimshaw building, OnondagaNationSchool and the high school. I have a curriculum with many many activities that we’ve done, that the teachers have put together, or I have put together, so no one has to feel like they have to create their own activity. We have a lot of excellent activities that teachers can tap into.
Over the years in working at the outdoor classroom I guess my name has gotten out there at least in the local community. I actually had a couple of people approach me from SUNDY ESF, the College of Forestry at Syracuse, and we formed an informal partnership. I had a grad student come and assist me in putting together an interpretive trail, which is a guided nature walk on our outdoor classroom. She did the brunt of the work. I was more or less the guide as to the property. In establishing that connection with ESF and meeting some of the people that actually work there or through the Department of Environmental Conservation, I’ve been able to connect those people to some of my students. And in doing that, it wasn’t my goal at the time, but found that those connections can really be meaningful with students actually seeing someone in the field who is doing something they are doing on a much more minor basis.
I’ve been part of the consortium in central New York here for investigating transition services at various colleges- for oh about three years now- and actually started a project on my own where I’m visiting area colleges and universities to find out about transition needs. I’m starting to hear from colleges in my visits that have students out there that have graduated, how they’re doing and they’ve given me some “Here’s how they could be doing better” and “Here’s some things that would really be helpful if you were doing at the high school level to prepare them for college.” And so I’m kind of in the middle of a project now that started out with more or less visitations and trying to gain some expertise and what’s needed for students, to actually tracking what’s actually going on with some students and preparing some students that I have in a more formalized way.
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This has been a podcast of the Employment and Disability Institute, located in the ILR School of Cornell University. You can find us on the web at
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