How can school personnel help bridge the gap between high school and adulthood for students with disabilities?

Transcript: Mary E. Morningstar, PhD

Interagency collaboration takes on quite a lot of different definitions in terms of the big picture. But in general, it is a process whereby you carefully and purposefully plan and design cross-agency, cross-program collaborative efforts related to transition outcomes for youth. That’s a definition that’s been given within the research for what interagency collaboration means. Now, that certainly doesn’t assist school practitioners to take it to the level they need for implementation. Many teachers serve different types of students. So if you’re a teacher who’s serving students with learning disabilities, their post-school outcomes—and therefore their support needs once they’re in the community and as adults—are going to look different than teachers who are working with students with significant disabilities who may have long-term support needs. For those students and families, they would access different types of agencies and supports in the community.

So understanding how it operates in each community and for each teacher will look slightly different. But in general, the process that would work for any teacher in any school district is first to identify the post-school outcomes (those measurable postsecondary goals that their students are interested in achieving) and then based on those outcomes to reach out and to go find the services and support that students would need in order to be successful in those postsecondary settings.

When we’re thinking about interagency collaboration, the critical groups that need to be involved certainly includes school personnel, whether that’s special ed teachers, transition coordinators, guidance counselors, school social workers. The folks that are engaged for all youth as they are exiting school and entering into their next phase, whether it’s postsecondary education or employment. That’s a critical piece of interagency collaboration. Families and students are also active and must be engaged in interagency collaboration themselves. They have very specific roles and responsibilities related to seeking out services and advocating for what they need from those service agencies.

And then the third and biggest, and that’s the group that’s most difficult to pin down. But those are those community organizations and agencies, both disability specific. For example, Vocational Rehabilitation or agencies that are serving students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, mental health centers with some of the disability-specific organizations. It can also include non-disability organizations. For example, a employment agency that’s serving anybody in the community or tutoring at a community college that’s not specific to disability tutoring. So when we think about the group that have to be engaged, it cuts across those three big groups: school, family, student, and then the community. It also cuts across disability-specific organizations and those that anybody can access whether you have a disability or not.

Transcript: Valerie L. Mazzotti, PhD

There are a number of reasons why secondary transition can be uniquely challenging for students with disabilities and their families. But one of the primary reasons is really around the lack of collaboration that happens between schools and communities and other school partners. And so what the research tells us is that when students with disabilities aren’t connected with the services and supports they need in high school in order to transition to post-school life, they are less likely to have positive post-school outcomes. And transition should be a coordinated effort among school personnel to support students with disabilities in the transition process. However, it often isn’t. And that often impacts students’ course of study and the services and supports that they get as they move through transition planning.

For example, we know that when students with disabilities have opportunities while they’re in high school to participate in a sequence of courses related to career technical education that they’re more likely to have positive outcomes and attain employment and attain postsecondary education at a higher rate than students who haven’t had those opportunities. But this requires coordinated planning not only with special education and career technical education. It requires coordinated planning with school counselors, with Vocational Rehabilitation. And so if those partners aren’t collaborating and coordinating to help students get the services and supports that they need, those students aren’t going to necessarily have an opportunity to take CTE courses in a sequence. And so it’s critical that schools are coordinating planning and collaborating between special education and general education, school counseling, and the community to ensure that students get connected with the services and supports that they need while they’re in high school to attain positive post-school outcomes.