Transition That Holds Up

For fourteen years, your child’s IEP ran on a comfortable rhythm of grades, accommodations, and annual goals. Then transition planning begins, and the stakes change completely. Suddenly, the measure of success isn’t a report card; it’s whether your child can navigate a bus, hold a job, manage money, and live with dignity as an adult. This is exactly where too many IEPs quietly fail.

Transition That Holds Up is the parent and advocate’s field guide to making sure yours doesn’t. Written by a Board Certified Behavior Analyst and special-education advocate, it translates dense federal law: IDEA, Endrew F., the « coordinated set of activities, » WIOA, and Pre-Employment Transition Services into plain language and, more importantly, into action. You’ll learn to spot the hollow goal (« will participate as tolerated ») on sight, demand measurable, enforceable goals, read an evaluation for what it really says, and monitor whether services are actually being delivered.

Every chapter pairs the concepts with tools you can use at the table: helpful scripts (what to say, and the law behind why it works), red-flag checklists, ready-to-send demand letters and formal request logs, progress-tracking methods, and step-by-step workflows for evaluations, vocational rehabilitation, the transfer of rights at age eighteen, and dispute resolution when you hit a wall.

This is not a book about hoping the system works. It’s about knowing your rights, recognizing when they’re ignored, and holding your district to the standard your child is legally owed. Whether you’re preparing for your first transition IEP or fighting for services promised years ago, you’ll close it knowing exactly what to demand, how to demand it, and how to make it stick.

Your child’s independence is too important to leave to the district’s defaults.