Magen Rooney-Kron, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, accepted the 2024 Early Career Researcher Award in December at TASH’s annual conference in New Orleans. The award recognizes research with the potential to impact practice, policy or future research on the inclusion of people with significant support needs. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)

Magen Rooney-Kron has been an active member of TASH since she was a doctoral student. TASH is an international organization that focuses on promoting equity, opportunity and inclusion for people with extensive support needs through research, practice and advocacy. To her, the organization has always felt like her “academic home.”

Understandably, it was emotional for Rooney-Kron, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, when she found out that TASH had awarded her its 2024 Early Career Researcher Award.

“To know that my peers think I’m worthy of this award – people that I care so deeply about, all the people who mentor me or collaborate with me – and to feel that they value my work was very special,” she said.

Rooney-Kron accepted the award at TASH’s annual conference in New Orleans in December. The award is designed to honor the contributions of those who have been active in the field for fewer than 10 years after receiving their PhD or EdD and recognizes research with the potential to impact practice, policy or future research on the inclusion of people with significant support needs. It was a full-circle moment for Rooney-Kron, who attended her first TASH conference almost a decade ago in St. Louis.

Rooney-Kron began her teaching career as a high school special education teacher in Chicago Public Schools. During that time, she was a co-teacher for biology, chemistry and math courses.

“I had students in my chemistry course who had more significant support needs, and I started to ask questions about what my students did after high school” she said. “The answer I received was, ‘They go home.’”

That didn’t sit right with Rooney-Kron. At the time, she was pursuing her master’s degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and was reading about internship programs for people with disabilities. She believed her students would benefit from similar programming and advocated to start a transition-to-work program at her school.

“I thought, ‘We can do better. We can do things to get students jobs and prepare them for post-school life,’” she said. “After a year, [the administration] said, ‘Great, here’s 13 students. Figure it out.’ So, I had 13 students my first year, and we started to build out the program.”

The experience motivated her to continue her advocacy and pursue a PhD in special education at UIUC to find a way to help other educators implement similar programs effectively. Throughout her PhD program, she was active with TASH’s Early Career Research Network, a group of emerging scholars who aim to use their research to promote TASH values of equity, opportunity and inclusion. She served as the Chair of the TASH Early Career Research Network from 2021 to 2023 and also began working as a research and grant coordinator with UMSL’s Office of Inclusive Postsecondary Education (OIPE) in 2021.

Rooney-Kron has since become a TASH board member and an assistant professor in the College of Education, teaching courses on inclusive practices and transition to post-school life. Her research focuses on promoting the inclusion of students with extensive support needs in transition services that lead to competitive, integrated employment. In particular, it has focused on work-based learning experiences, which provide students with disabilities opportunities to gain hands-on work experience and training in community businesses.

“How can we plan work-based learning experiences to include students with more extensive support needs?” she said. “What does it look like to do that well, so that these experiences actually lead to paid employment?”

Through in-depth interviews with educators, Rooney-Kron has found that the key to doing so effectively is mirroring competitive, integrative employment as closely as possible. To prepare students for employment, educators and employers should provide meaningful work experiences that align with students’ interests and strengths, systematic instruction and natural supports from co-workers.

“Another big component is having high expectations for students and enabling dignity of risk,” she said. “A lot of times, we like to prevent people with disabilities from failing because we’re worried that they’re not able to handle it, or we just want to protect them. But dignity of risk promotes that people with disabilities should be able to take risks just like everybody else and learn from their mistakes, because that’s often how we learn best.”

She would like to build on this work by gaining the perspectives of students who participate in work-based learning experiences. Ultimately, she hopes her research will provide guidance to teachers about how to plan and implement high-quality work experiences for students with more extensive support needs.

“I really would like to create a toolkit with a tool that teachers can use to understand how to implement high-quality experiences,” Rooney-Kron said. “They could use the toolkit to plan and evaluate work experiences.”

In addition to this work, Rooney-Kron is a co-principal investigator on a 2020 Transition and Postsecondary Programs for Students with Intellectual Disabilities (TPSID) grant from the U.S. Department of Education, which provided $2.1 million in federal funding to augment OIPE’s flagship Succeed Program – an inclusive postsecondary education program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

She’s happy to have found another academic home at an institution committed to positively impacting inclusive education.

“It’s exciting,” she said. “It’s great to work with a team of people who are all focused on providing access to education and employment for people with disabilities. Coming to UMSL, I didn’t have much experience with inclusive postsecondary education, so that’s been a great opportunity to learn how these programs can be another pathway to employment for students with disabilities. It’s broadened my understanding of pathways to employment and broadened the scope of my work. It’s been incredible to work with the staff and faculty affiliated with OIPE to complement and enhance my work.”