My husband and I live in Falmouth and are the parents of a 17-1/2 year old daughter, Chelsea, who has a language-based learning disability. Chelsea has received special education services since the end of first grade. Currently she is a junior in college and pursuing her dream of becoming a first or second grade teacher.

In Chelsea’s freshman year, the three of us were fortunate enough to have attended a Southern Maine Advisory Council on Transition Conference. We learned a wonderful, student driven, dynamic transition process. As a result, that has helped us obtain information and become educated in the wide variety of areas that needed to be covered in order for her to successfully achieve Chelsea’s post-secondary pursuit.

We have found that the Special Education, Guidance, and school department in general, have extremely limited knowledge about the transition process, laws, and needs for Chelsea as a student with a learning disability. As working parents, we never would have had the time to adequately search for and obtain all this information on our own. Chelsea has always found learning to be a challenge and far more work than her peers. Without the Transition Council’s assistance and resources, she would have encountered numerous barriers and obstacles which would have made identifying and achieving her life’s goal much more complicated and difficult, and perhaps even unobtainable.

Additionally, as parents, we have been able to take all our Transition Council learning and use it to educate other parents, students, and school staff. We have done this on the local, southern Maine, and statewide level in an effort to effect system wide change so youth with special needs can have promising futures and life after high school.

Read Chelsea’s story.