For Melanie Moore, walking past a classroom full of professionals learning skills to better serve people with intellectual and developmental disabilities at the Jubilee Association of Maryland in Kensington is both “surreal and really exciting.”
“I kind of pinch myself a little bit,” Moore, director of the association’s Jubilee Academy, recently told Bethesda Today. “I can’t believe that … the dream that I had actually came true, and it’s just so exciting.”
Moore said the Jubilee Academy, which opened in November, fills a need for more comprehensive training for direct support professionals that she noticed when she began working at the association in 2018. The Academy offers classes in everything from adult CPR to cultural humility.
Jubilee, founded in 1978, helps adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Montgomery County with residential services, such as providing one-on-one support, and housing services, including helping to secure affordable and accessible housing, according to its website. To provide those services, Jubilee hires and trains support professionals.
Most of the training available for professionals supporting people with disabilities focuses on basic safety and state requirements, Moore said. The basics are important, she noted, but don’t include other skills that could be valuable to the providers and lower the profession’s roughly 31% annual turnover rate in Maryland, according to a 2023 survey on the direct support professional workforce.
With the intent of lowering that turnover rate, the academy has taught 168 students since opening in November.
“The academy was a result of daydreaming,” Jubilee Executive Director Steve Keener told Bethesda Today recently. “It all came out of some work that a number of service providers had been doing to help direct support professionals be more successful in their jobs.”
Around 2017, Jubilee joined the Silver Spring nonprofit Seeking Employment, Equality and Community (SEEC), other disability service providers and the Maryland Developmental Disability Administration in creating a direct support professional class to teach advanced problem-solving to help support people with disabilities.
Keener said the group saw how the class helped support professionals feel better about their work and improve how they perform their jobs – while also helping them to stay longer in their jobs. Keener said the success of the class sparked dreams of bringing together “the best curriculums and the best trainers” from multiple providers to offer advanced training to any support professional.
Then, the family behind the William S. Abell Foundation approached Jubilee looking to provide a grant following the death of family member Patricia Abell, who had disabilities.
With that money, the academy achieved lift-off.
The courses, which support professionals from any organization can attend, cover skills that the state requires for certification to work in disability services, such as adult CPR and first aid, medication administration and crisis prevention and de-escalation skills. It also offers other courses that aren’t required for certification such as cultural humility, an approach to understanding other cultures; advanced problem-solving; and transformative communication, according to the Jubilee website.
Support professionals can pick which in-person classes they attend. Class costs range from $45 to $415, and are typically covered by the professional’s employer. Instructors are provided by local organizations.
“This is the first time that I’m aware of that you have a group of trainers and a group of trainings that are being offered at a bigger scale and offering them for tuition paid by other service providers,” Keener said.
Julia McCune, an instructor of transformative communication and director of community engagement at Jubilee, said every class she’s taught has resulted in different experiences for her and those attending. The transformative communication class teaches people “how to hold difficult conversations,” McCune said.
“Every single session, I come away with a greater understanding of how to communicate,” McCune said. “We get vulnerable in this class. … People who come in as strangers leave feeling like they know each other, even just after two hours.”
James Kivembele, who leads a service team at Jubilee, said in a statement the classes refined his skills and increased his confidence in working with people with disabilities.
Dealing with worker shortages, turnover
Amid the development of the academy, the direct support profession has faced significant worker shortages and turnover, Keener and Moore said.
According to the 2023 National Core Indicators State of the Workforce survey for intellectual and developmental disabilities, which collects data on the direct support professional workforce, the average annual turnover rate in 2023 from the 24 states that participated was roughly 40%. Maryland’s annual turnover rate was about 31%.
According to the survey, the average hourly wage for Maryland support professionals was $17.52.
Turnover creates issues in consistent services and can also indicate the professional’s lack of satisfaction with the job, Keener said.
“The work of the direct support professional is incredibly skilled, and I think that they’re really undervalued by our society as a whole,” Moore said. “We know that one of the ways to reduce [turnover] is to give people opportunities to learn and grow and feel like they have the tools they need to navigate their jobs successfully because then they’re more likely to stick around.”
Looking forward, Moore said Jubilee is hoping to expand classes for support professionals into topics such as mental health first aid.
Keener said getting the academy off the ground has been a “huge relief” after worries such as making sure to have enough talented instructors.
“If you want really good human services work, you’ve got to invest in the people who are doing frontline work,” he said.