Amanda Lewis is a native to Tallahassee, and has been working with young adults with disabilities for over 10 years. She slowly moved from working as a summer camp counselor, to pursuing her dreams of getting her Master’s Degree in Special Education from Florida State University. It was there that she found her place in the world of helping young adults in the Leon County Schools’ ACE Transition Program. In the program, she worked for 6 years, first as a paraprofessional, and then as a lead teacher. While there, Amanda spear-headed a redesign of the Transition Program that included establishing community partners, setting up job training sites, developing mobility training, and using research-based lesson plans and methods to teach independent living and work readiness skills. Amanda won Teacher of the Year for her school in 2016. In 2018, she was nationally recognized as Teacher of the Year for Council for Exceptional Children’s Division on Autism and Developmental Disabilities. In addition, she developed and implemented the instruction for The ACE Transition Summer Institute for the first three years of the program (2017-2019).
