Tips & TricksSeptember 16th, 2022

Student-to-Adult Transitions-A 21st Century Guide for Parents and Teens

By Tina Schneider

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Graphic showing the LiveBinders binder icon surrounded by a large image of earphones. The text LiveBinders appears on the left side and vertically placed by the headset. Beneath the earphones is the text Organize Success Podcast. To the right of the earphones is the text Special Guest with a picture of Lisa Washington underneath it and her name Lisa Washington Arkansas Transition Consultant Southwest Arkansas below her picture. Underneath that text is a picture of her binder icon with a graphic cover that says Student Portfolio Manual. There is text underneath the graphic that says AR Transition Portfolio Manual 06132022.

Lisa Washington has created a online binder with invaluable resources to help teachers, parents and students prepare for life after high school.

It’s not often that I get the chance to learn first hand about the types of projects our users are working on every day, so I was fortunate to have an opportunity to engage with Lisa Washington regarding her Arkansas Transition Portfolio Manual LiveBinder.

Lisa is a student-to-adult transition consultant for the Arkansas Transition Services team at Dawson Education Service Cooperative.  Lisa and her team train teachers and consultants to help prepare parents and their high school students with special needs to transition to life as adults.

Lisa’s goal was to organize all the material into an online binder so that parents and students could access the resources outside of the school environment, and long after they graduate.

While working with Lisa, I soon discovered that although her resources target students with IEPs or 504s, they are also relevant for any high school parent and student. For this reason, I invited Lisa to share her project with us. As a mother of young adult daughters, the realization that I no longer have access to my daughters private information was eye-opening, and I believe this information would be beneficial to all parents of high school students. 

In addition to the invaluable resources Lisa provides, I also candidly share the epiphany I had working with Lisa as she tried to organize her resources into an online binder for 3 different stakeholders – teachers, parents and students.  Anyone who curates material for an audience will appreciate the challenges we faced and the realization we had when we saw that working with a simple outline can help address a major issue of going digital.

Our podcast co-host Linda Houle joins me as we have Lisa lead us through the 5 areas of preparation that a student needs to go through to start their #adulting journey.

To access the podcast link, Lisa’s binder, and the podcast transcript, please click this link.  From there, you will be able to download her resources and/or launch her website forms directly from her binder.