Excessed Teacher of the Year Has New Role at San Diego Unified 

This post has been updated.

There’s good news in the works for a San Diego Unified teacher reporter Jakob McWhinney profiled last week.  

For nearly two decades, Stacy Williams worked at TRACE, a school that helps adult students with disabilities learn the skills they need to transition to life after high school. Her work with those students was celebrated, earning her the designation as a San Diego County Teacher of the Year in 2025.  

But just last week, she found out her position at the school had been eliminated, leaving her in a professional limbo. She would still have a job at the district, but exactly what it would look like was unclear.  

The experience was crushing for Williams. Not only because of the emotional whiplash, but because she felt the work she did at TRACE was vital. The school teaches kids real-life skills they’ll need to lead independent lives, like providing job training or showing kids how to open a bank account or ride the bus.

“It’s so demeaning, because you go from being in the spotlight to feeling useless,” she told McWhinney. 

Days later, though, she found out she’d be able to return to her school. She was also given a new role within the district – to help rethink how the district’s transitional services program works entirely.  

For Williams, this was a dream come true. She’s long felt the district’s program wasn’t working as well as it could. Her pitch is that it should expand, keeping TRACE in place while also embedding services in individual high school sites, so they aren’t just accessible to students after they graduate. Williams hopes to bring together stakeholders, from parents and students to special education staff, to “create something innovative and different.” 

“I don’t have all the answers. No one person does,” Williams wrote in a Facebook post. “What I do have is a deep belief in our students and a passion for making sure they have meaningful opportunities to learn, work, build independence, participate in their communities, and create lives they are proud of.” 

Superintendent Fabiola Bagula said Williams is being added to a work group focused on reimagining how best to deliver transitional services. The hope is to create a program that can pilot a more integrated approach that provides services to students at their schools to prior to a more comprehensive launch in years to come. 

“How can we offer some of those services at their sites so they can stay within their communities?” Bagula asked. “That’s something we want to leverage Stacy’s knowledge and expertise around.” 

But she said they first have an even more basic task — “how are we educating parents that this transitional program even exists?” 

She was confronted with just how under the radar the program is at a recent meeting of the Community Advisory Council on Special Education. The group is filled with parents and staff who are deeply knowledgeable about San Diego Unified’s special education offerings. Still, one parent wasn’t even aware the district offered transitional services. That lack of visibility has contributed to declining numbers of students taking advantage of the program’s services, Bagula said.  

“But I think if parents knew about it they’d access it,” she said.  

Part of that work will be constructing a communication plan that gets information about the program not only to parents, but to staff who can recommend it to students, said Deputy Superintendent Nicole DeWitt. 

“The hope is that students understand what they have access to … beyond their ‘senior year,’ and how they can access those services, whether that means services at TRACE or services at their school sites,” DeWitt said.  

Williams shares Bagula and DeWitt’s optimism. Still, she’s striking a note of caution. 

“I also want to be very clear about what this opportunity is—and what it isn’t. This is a one-year opportunity to do the work of listening, engaging, designing, and learning. There is a lot to figure out, and meaningful change takes time and intentional engagement, especially with our families,” Williams wrote. 

Clarification: This post was edited to clarify Williams’ pitch for expanded transition services in San Diego Unified.

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