Parent and Youth Post-School Expectations: Students With Intellectual Disability in Rural Schools

While research exists on parent expectations associated with post-school outcomes of youth with intellectual disability, limited research examines issues of parent—and youth—post-school expectations relative to issues of community, such as living in rural versus urban or suburban settings. Through a secondary analysis of the National Longitudinal Transition Study (NLTS) 2012, we examined parent and youth expectations regarding post-school outcomes for students with intellectual disability relative to school locale (i.e., rural, urban, and suburban) and severity of intellectual disability. Youth from rural schools reported high rates of positive post-school expectations with regard to independent living and being employed, and their rates relative to independent living exceeded parental expectations. However, across the different variables, school locale was only a factor in the binary or ordinal logistic regression analyses for two dependent variables: parental expectation for their child to support themselves financially and parental expectations of obtained level of education.