How can school and agency personnel work together to support smooth transitions for these students?

Transcript: Mary Morningstar, PhD

The stages of interagency collaboration are different. These first two—networking and coordination—are often the strategies that are more focused on what individual youth and families might need, versus the other two, cooperation and collaboration, which tend to be more systems or programmatic focused. I can give you examples that might allow for a better understanding at each of those four stages. In some respects, they’re sequential. So the first stage is networking. This is the lowest level. You can’t jump to full-scale collaboration until everyone who’s engaged has some understanding of what each other does to begin with. So oftentimes it’s the first stage when people come together to plan for and prepare during transition. So it is where, from a school perspective, they often spend time identifying the services that students and families need, and then sharing referral information. For example, a lot of districts develop transition guidebooks that include the range of community agencies in their community that families and students could access. Another example is a transition fair. Lots of schools, once or twice a year, bring together all the major agencies in their community, and they hold a transition fair where families and students can find out and talk with the range of community organizations based on what their needs are. Another example would be community resource mapping. This may be something that not just schools would do but they might do it with some other community organizations.

Within coordination, an example might be that a transition coordinator in a district would get a group of students together who are interested in going onto a community college in their town or in the town next door. They might go on a formal visit. They would be not only getting a visit of the campus but going and speaking directly with the disability student services organization at that community college. Students can ask questions about the accommodations they may need in order to be successful at that community college. It’s one step up from just knowing about what’s out there. It’s actually where school personnel and outside agencies can provide some more advocacy and support to the individual families and students to ensure there’s a successful handoff.

For cooperation and collaboration, this is where we start heading into more of a systems level. Some examples of that might be where a school, the district would invite VR counselors to come once a week and visit the school, maybe give them space where there is an office where VR counselors can actually do the intake process for vocational rehabilitation. Going back, schools might give referral information to families and students at the networking level then ratchet it up to a cooperation level. There might be a memorandum of understanding where VR comes into the school once a week and would complete some of the vocational assessment and intake process, so that students can be actually done with the referral process before they graduate from high school. That’s one example of how you might work at a systems level to cooperate together both from schools and outside agencies.

The schools may work with a mental health center for students who have been identified with mental health needs. They may be coordinating their counseling services and their mental health services with the school. A school social worker might be more involved so that students can access the adult mental health services that they need once they exit school. Those are examples of cooperation.

When we really talk about collaboration, it is where systems are developing new programs and probably where the rubber meets the road if they’re jointly funded. Up until now, you can do a lot together. The best example I know of—and it’s happening in many states—is where education funds and vocational rehabilitation funds jointly pool their resources and their funding so that they can provide substantial and intensive transition program particularly related to employment. The collaborative fundings allow new staff to be hired. They may be school staff that are partially funded with rehab money, or they may be a VR staff with partially funded money from schools. And those programs are the ones that are the most impactful in terms of the outcome for the students they’re serving with disabilities, and in this case in particular to employment.