This paper examines how creative thinking techniques can be used to help rural educators provide effective transition programs and services to secondary students. Factors affecting transition in rural areas include a small, homogenous economic base; travel time and distance between job sites; lack of services and trained staff; the community role of schools in rural areas; less formal politics; and a rural-oriented work ethic. The literature suggests that self-determination, secondary school reform, and public policy alignment also affect rural services. The challenge before rural educators is to take advantage of existing positive elements in their community to create new solutions to problems in transitioning disabled students from school to work. The five stages of a creative problem-solving model include fact finding, problem finding, idea finding, solution finding, and acceptance finding. One method for generating information is forced creativity, which involves techniques to clarify a problem and generate solutions. One technique of forced creativity is attribute listing--listing principle characteristics or attributes of a problem and generating ideas for improving or changing each attribute. Another technique is morphological synthesis--identifying one set of problem attributes on an axis in matrix form and identifying a second set on another axis, allowing for all possible interactions between the diverse sets. There are also checklists available to help generate considerations or questions to discover aspects of a problem or process. This paper suggests that by selecting a creative thinking technique and applying it to the identified problem of transition in rural communities, unique solutions to an individual's transition problem can be generated. (LP)