“The Lifeblood of Our Community”: A Case Study of One Rural Community Unified in Bolstering Secondary Transition Services

Abstract

The transition to adulthood for many young people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) living in rural communities necessitates supports grounded in local assets. In this article, we describe findings from a community-based participatory case study in which one rural school district collaborated with researchers to harness their local community toward forging novel transition pathways for youth with IDD. Specifically, we collaborated with educator partners to employ mixed methods (i.e., interviews, community conversation event) to examine the community’s (a) motivations for launching local change to expand transition services, (b) most promising ideas for leveraging rural cultural wealth to address gaps, and (c) views of these strategies and their capacity for adopting such efforts. Collectively, our findings center the rural resourcefulness of school communities as prevailing capital for successful transitions, emphasizing the importance of storytelling and leveraging the rural school as a vehicle for addressing rural inequities in the delivery of adult disability services. Implications offer important recommendations for research and practice aimed at designing place-based transition services that harness the rural cultural wealth of local communities—alongside formal school and adult agency services— for supporting students with IDD in achieving their postsecondary goals.