Jay Sellers joined CDS Dec. 1 as the Career and Life Certificate (CLSC) program manager. CLSC, CDS’s two-year postsecondary program for students with intellectual disabilities, combines academics, career exploration and life skills growth with opportunities to participate in UD campus life. As manager, Sellers will train CLSC staff and UD undergraduate mentors and develop curricula for CLSC classes. He will also search for partnership opportunities with other UD departments.

Sellers arrived at CDS from Temple University’s Russell Conwell Learning Center, where he supported first-generation, low-income college students adapting to undergraduate life. He says that lessons from his time at Temple will guide his work with CLSC: student success depends on understanding the school’s expectations, and staff’s primary job is to promote students’ independence.

The ultimate goal, he says, is to enable students to “develop the tools necessary to become more independent in their learning, in their application of the skills they learn and in their growth as leaders.”

One of Sellers’s first projects, done in tandem with Program Assistant Rebecca Jewell, is establishing DiverseABILITY, an inclusive living-learning experience integrating CLSC students and UD freshmen on campus. DiverseABILITY, which Sellers projects will begin in the fall 2018 semester, builds on the two-year-old CLSC residential program that enables CLSC students to live in residence halls.