How can school and agency personnel work together to support smooth transitions for these students?
Page 6: Establishing Interagency Collaboration
Effective interagency collaboration does not happen overnight. It takes time for school personnel to develop positive and constructive working relationships with representatives from outside agencies that serve students and families. Although the transition coordinator typically takes the lead when establishing these partnerships, all members of the IEP team can be involved. The stages detailed in the table below demonstrate how interagency collaboration is established and strengthened.
| Stage | Description | Example |
| Networking |
The transition coordinator:
|
A transition coordinator shares information about local VR services with a student and their family. |
| Coordination |
The transition coordinator:
|
After meeting with a student and their family, the transition coordinator arranges a meeting with the VR representative to discuss the student’s future employment goals. |
| Cooperation |
The school and agency personnel:
|
The transition coordinator works with the VR representative to establish Pre-ETS for their high school students. They decide that the VR representative will conduct transition assessments and the transition coordinator will provide direct support to students on their transition goals. |
| Collaboration |
The school and agency personnel:
|
The local education agency and the VR agency develop an agreement to ensure collaboration during transition services. This agreement allows VR personnel to be housed within high schools and to provide Pre-ETS to students with disabilities. |
Bettie Ray Butler describes the importance of building community partnerships that are responsive to students’ and families’ backgrounds and goals (time: 1:39).
Bettie Ray Butler, PhD
Professor of Urban Education
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Content Specialist, NTACT:C
Transcript: Bettie Ray Butler, PhD
I cannot overemphasize building external partnerships: community partnerships with local businesses, community partnerships with faith-based institutions, community partnerships with the colleges and universities. And that includes community colleges. It includes private colleges. It includes historically black colleges and universities, which we affectionately call HBCUs. It’s maintaining these community partnerships so that when the youth expresses what their goals are, there are resources available that educators can connect the family and the student to make sure that post-school success is more likely to happen. If we’re talking about students with disabilities that are also from culturally and ethnically diverse backgrounds, we want to tap into those minority-owned businesses. We want to build relationships with colleges and universities that are situated within and outside the student’s communities. We just want to make sure that we’re building relationships that are beyond our protective space within educational institutions so that we’re initiating these community partnerships, so that we’re building resources that we can share with families. We can serve as the bridge that connects them to these different external entities that are situated outside of the immediate educational context of the school.
Did You Know?
Often, a school and agency engaged in interagency collaboration will benefit from the development of a formal agreement detailing how each participant will be involved during transition planning. This agreement is sometimes called a memorandum of understanding (MOU).
Interagency collaboration involves schools and agencies working together not only to support individual students but also to facilitate broader systems of support within communities and states. These teams can focus on specific goals relevant to their context and needs. Below are examples of interagency collaboration teams at three levels: student, community, and state.
- Focus: The student-level team—usually the same as the IEP team—is primarily focused on transition planning for an individual student with a disability.
- Team Members: The team is led by the transition coordinator and includes the student, their parents, and the school professionals required by IDEA. Additional team members and agency representatives are included based on the student’s and family’s individual needs, goals, and preferences.
- Responsibilities: The team creates and implements an individual student’s Individualized Transition Plan (ITP).
- Focus: The community-level team is primarily focused on linking school personnel and adult service providers to support transition services.
- Team Members: The team can include a wide range of professional representatives from schools and community organizations, as well as family members and students or adults with disabilities.
- Responsibilities: The team helps to identify gaps in services within the local community and to plan solutions to bridge these gaps.
- Focus: The state-level team is primarily focused on developing and evaluating large-scale systems for transition service delivery.
- Team Members: The team often includes state-level leaders of public agencies (e.g., director of the Department of Health), legislators, parent representatives, school representatives, and representatives from community organizations.
- Responsibilities: The team establishes policies and systems to prevent service gaps and increase the efficiency of services among agencies. They also evaluate the success of state and local transition services.
Mary E. Morningstar discusses the different roles of a student-level team (i.e., IEP team) and a community-level team in interagency collaboration (time: 3:00).
Mary E. Morningstar, PhD
Professor of Special Education
Portland State University
Co-Director of the Transition Coalition
Transcript: Mary E. Morningstar, PhD
When we talk about the teams needed for transition, certainly the IEP team is the team that is most focused on the student. Oftentimes if there isn’t a transition coordinator in a building, the teacher or the case manager for that student’s IEP often by default falls into that role of having to know about outside agencies. It’s written into the law that if students are already being served by an outside agency, or it’s expected they would be served, then the IEP case manager is responsible for inviting those outside agencies to attend the IEP meeting.
The role of beginning the process of collaboration for any special education teacher who’s involved with students during transition planning is important. But it really is focused on what’s going on with that particular student, and because it’s an IEP, it’s really only during the period of time when the student is engaged in school in special ed services. When we think about models of interagency collaboration, the model that I’m most familiar with that is used most often around the country and across multiple states is a community transition team. That is where school personnel and all of the outside agencies might come together to start the planning process for collaboration. It may be at the district level if it’s a large district. It may be in a city or in a town. Or it could be at a county level or a regional level. This is particularly the case in more rural communities, where services are more spread out or they may only be offered in a regional location. Then you might have several districts joining a regional community transition team. But that is where you would bring all the outside agencies together. That’s often where they start to network because they have to know about and learn about each other. And then once they know about and learn about each other, they can start identifying where the barriers are in their community to successfully transition. And then they can identify some of those barriers, and then as a team they work together to solve and come up with solutions that are more at the systems level. So that will be beneficial to all the students coming through transition. So those are the teams that are most common when we talk about how you start planning for interagency collaboration.
For additional information about content discussed on this page, review the following resources. Please note that these resources are not required readings to complete this module. Links to these resources can be found in the Additional Resources tab on the References, Additional Resources, and Credits page. Characteristics of Interagency Collaboration AssessmentTeams at any level seeking to begin or improve their interagency collaboration can use this checklist as a self-assessment to guide their work. |
