Season 2 Episode 1: Adult Transition Programming an Interview with Dean Weese

Dr. Juan Treminio interviews Dean Wies, who has spent 31 years as a transition teacher and is currently a lead teacher in an adult transition program serving students ages 18-22. Dean describes his program's structure (9 classrooms, 11-14 students each, heterogeneous ability levels ranging from students needing full physical support to students with driver's licenses) and explains his philosophy of treating students as adults with real responsibilities and natural consequences.

The conversation covers how the program builds functional life skills (banking, money management, self-advocacy) to counter "learned helplessness" some students develop in high school; how Individual Transition Plans (ITPs) are built around student-driven interviews and interests (e.g., wanting to work at Chick-fil-A, live in a group home, or learn to drive); and how video documentation in IEPs has been a powerful, trust-building tool for showing families skills growth they wouldn't otherwise believe.

Dean also details the mechanics of job placement: a team of job developers who solicit paid (workability-grant-funded) and volunteer job sites and formalize each placement with a detailed "job contract." He explains his program's close collaboration with the San Diego Regional Center (inviting caseworkers to IEPs), and with programs like Miramar College's College to Career (C2C) program, a competitive three-year certificate program. Dean shares how he began proactively connecting families to outside agencies after seeing students sit idle for months post-graduation, which evolved into an annual resource fair.

The episode closes with Dean's observations on a demographic shift toward more students with higher support needs entering transition programs since the alternate diploma pathway was introduced, his advice for early-grade educators (start functional skills young; let students fail safely), and a walkthrough of his classroom's daily routine (morning check-in, community outings, job sites, afternoon IEP-goal work).