COEUR d'ALENE - Liz Cuff compared herself and her fellow graduates to growing, baby peregrine falcons that she recently observed online, on a website streaming video of the happenings in the little birds' nest.

"I feel like I'm about to stretch out my wings," the 19-year-old said. "It's made me optimistic that we could all go out into the world and be OK."

That is the goal of Project Search, the program that Cuff and six other young adults graduated from on Wednesday in the Fox Auditorium on the Kootenai Medical Center campus.

Project Search provides workplace employment training for 18- to- 21-year-olds with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It is offered through a partnership between the Coeur d'Alene School District, Kootenai Health and several local service agencies: Tesh, Ability Works and the Idaho Division of Vocational Rehabilitation.

In its third year, Project Search offers eligible young adults unpaid internships that take place at Kootenai Health over the course of a school year, beginning in September. They work with a job coach, Linda Kunkel, who is a Tesh employee, and Theresa Moran, a Coeur d'Alene School District special education teacher. Both of the women are based at Kootenai Health.

The interns take classes on employability and independent living skills, and spend hours working side-by-side with regular hospital employees in various departments, completing three rotations throughout the year.

They perform a multitude of jobs - cleaning, doing laundry, transporting equipment, child care, office work and more.

Cuff said she learned a lot about herself during her rotations, which included time working in the hospital's nutrition services and information services departments.

"I think my personality just bloomed, you know, from this closed up little bud, into a flower," she said.

She discovered that she likes working with others.

"I used to hate teamwork, because of bullying at school," she said. "Here, I realized there really are nice, good people out there."

Cuff is in the process of seeking work. She has submitted applications to a local computer service company and has applied for a dietary aide's position at Kootenai Medical Center. The crowd of about 100 family members, hospital and partnering agency employees at Wednesday's graduation gave Cuff a round of applause when she announced she has an interview scheduled for the hospital job.

Cody Mayall, a Post Falls 18-year-old, said that in addition to other employment skills like time management, he learned how to ride Citylink, the county's public transportation service, to "work" every day.

Mayall's rotations include interning at KMC Kids, the employee childcare service on the hospital campus, and for Senior Care, an adult day program offered by the hospital.

Graduating was a bittersweet experience for Mayall.

"I'm excited, but I almost don't want to, because I really enjoyed what I did," he said.

He plans to seek employment in child care or adult day care.

Project Search got its start in 1996 at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, by an emergency room director who was frustrated with the high turnover rate in entry-level jobs that involved restocking supplies. She worked with advocacy groups that worked on behalf of the disabled, and with workforce development groups to develop the Project Search model. It was a way to fill jobs while providing opportunities and advocacy for people with disabilities.

Frances Huffman, the Coeur d'Alene School District's director of special services, visited Cincinnati to see it for herself.

Huffman spoke to the group at Wednesday's graduation and said that what she found, and brought back to Coeur d'Alene, was a "compelling image" of young adults learning how to be good employees, in an adult setting.

Prior to Project Search, special education students in need of this type of transitional support from high school to the work world, were receiving it mainly at the high schools, she said. The older students were out in the community, at businesses from time-to-time, she said, but there was little continuity.

"And you were still on the big, yellow school bus," Huffman said.

Huffman, who has worked in special education for 35 years, said that when she saw the Project Search at work in Ohio, she knew they could recreate that "compelling image" in the Coeur d'Alene community.

She said that seeing it come to fruition is the "cherry on the top" of her career.

Theresa Moran, who helped Huffman create the local program, said she considers herself lucky to be a part of it. There were six graduates last year and the first year. Next year, they have 11 students entering the program.

It started with six hospital departments willing to take on interns, and grew to 12 this year.

"Without these departments, Project Search wouldn't be here," Moran said.

Community support for Project Search and its interns extends beyond the hospital, to the North Idaho business community, with a host of companies that have offered job shadowing opportunities, and several that have hired program graduates.

Moran said they are always looking for more employers who would like to hire these job ready adults.

Danny Klocko, Kootenai Health's vice president of human resources, also spoke at Wednesday's graduation.

He said that while the program is great for the students, it's also a valuable resource because it fosters community employment by creating good job candidates for often hard-to-fill positions.

Klocko said that having Project Search at the hospital is rewarding for the employees that work with the interns.

"It's really us who should be thanking you, and Theresa," Klocko told the graduates. "Because I think it's changed our lives."

Information: Theresa Moran, 666-3435 or tmoran@cdaschools.org

Project Search

class of 2013

Donald Benton

Elizabeth Cuff

Jeremiah Cooper

Paula Fink

Anastasia Leighton

Cody Mayall

Abigail Waterdown