Welcome to IDEA Partnership's Collaborative Work on Secondary Transition

The IDEA Partnership is dedicated to improving outcomes for students and youth with disabilities by joining state agencies and stakeholders through shared work and learning. This dedication has been operationalized in the collaborative work on Secondary Transition of 23 partner organization representatives, two technical assistance providers, and a number of state and local organizations and agencies. Members of this Secondary Transition collaborative work group represent a range of roles at all levels of the education system as well as coming from geographic locations from across the United States. Together with the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), these partners form a community with the potential to transform the way we work.

Transition services under IDEA 2004 is defined as a coordinated set of activities for a student with a disability that is designed to be within a results-oriented process. The focus is on improving the academic and functional achievement of the child with a disability to facilitate the child’s movement from school to post-school activities. (See more information in the Grounding Assumptions below.)  The tools and resources  within this Secondary Transition Collection will help you improve the transition process for those to whom it applies.

• Our Charge is to think about Secondary Transition from stakeholder perspectives at all knowledge levels, to look at things differently, and to speak to practical application by taking the ideas of researchers and making them tangible to those in the field.

• Our Goal is to provide you with access to a comprehensive collection of materials and resources to assist you in furthering understanding of Secondary Transition processes. We hope this collection complements your current work, and we encourage you to share it with your colleagues and peers.

• Guiding Principles

• Fact Sheet

• Essential Elements

• Grounding Assumptions

• Needs of the Field

• Glossary

• PowerPoint and Presenter Guide

Navigating Secondary Transition- PowerPoint Presentation

Navigating Secondary Transition- Presenter Guide

The PowerPoint presentation and accompanying Presenter Guide provide an overview of how to navigate the secondary transition process. These tools were written by practitioners for practitioners and answer the important who, what, when, where and how questions. The Dialogue Guides (see below) provide opportunities to dialogue on the topics and concepts with all stakeholders.

Dialogue Guides are models for conducting interactive discussions across stakeholders.. Each Guide circulates a common set of source materials and suggested procedures for involving various audiences in States and districts. In this manner, stakeholders all over the country can begin interacting in new ways around implementation issues. Each dialogue guide title has questions written specifically for a target audience by representatives of that audience.

Your Voice

Your experiences help the Partnership and our readers understand issues and perspectives.  Please take a minute to share:

• Your Secondary Transition initiative and the strategies involved

• What strategies are working and reasons for success

• What problems (barriers) you have encountered and how they were solved

• Innovative approaches to interventions in all 3 tiers

• How you promote Secondary Transition initiative across groups and organizations.

To help us understand how the Partnership collection is useful, please take a minute to share:

• How you used the collection

• Your reactions to the collection

• Your ideas for improving the collection