John H. Hager, assistant secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), U.S. Department of Education, is pleased to share with you the following message regarding a new initiative at the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA). RSA program legislation and Department of Education regulations require oversight and monitoring of all programs and grant projects administered by RSA. This responsibility includes conducting annual reviews and performing periodic monitoring of programs to determine whether states are complying substantially with the provisions of their plans and with established evaluation standards and performance indicators.
When Secretary Spellings visited us here at OSERS soon after she was appointed secretary, she made the point that in our work we should never lose sight of the fact that we are about results for people. Since then, she has been challenging us to think beyond business-as-usual to how we can best improve results for people with disabilities.
We know that improving vocational rehabilitation (VR) services and employment outcomes for people with disabilities requires a robust system of monitoring. That has led Acting RSA Commissioner Ed Anthony and me to launch the Monitoring Redesign Initiative (MRI) to improve RSA's monitoring system of state VR agencies.
The MRI will build on the most effective aspects of our current monitoring activities. It will be a collaborative effort among consumers, community partners, state rehabilitation councils and state agencies to create a system that will be continuous, performance-based and tailored to the needs of individual state agencies. Under the new system, RSA's monitoring reports will be issued in a timely manner and our review procedures will be implemented consistently across the country. RSA's data collection and monitoring activities will be integrated so that the process of review and improvement will be continuous and eliminate time lags between assessing performance and conducting review activities.
Over time, we want this collaboration to result in a state-level network of stakeholders who assist us in identifying and realizing improvements that need to be made to the VR service delivery system. We want the monitoring system's development and operation to be transparent and the results to be widely disseminated to our stakeholders and all interested parties.
I am pleased to tell you that we have created a Web site in order to share information about the status of the MRI. A steering committee of VR stakeholders has been assembled and has begun to plan for a monitoring conference in Washington, D.C., this coming August, when a blueprint for the new monitoring system will be developed.
RSA Monitoring Redesign Initiative Resources.
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