By bringing into the equation of transitional services the special needs personnel at local colleges and vocational institutions, the interagency agreement described here will ensure that upon the student's eventual arrival at one such institution, there will be people familiar with his case and prepared to accommodate his needs. These respective agency types can then help a disabled student to train a focus on the specific career goals which have been identified either with the assistance of counselors.
Using the Strategic Planning Meeting as a method to identifying willing and helpful stakeholders in the process, the public partnership in question relies heavily on such networking to both orient the community toward our collective goals and to foster natural communication between such agencies at a personal level. By inviting and bringing into contact such groups as decision-makers from local law organizations, leaders from public recreation leagues and university personnel, as well as teacher, student and parent groups, a public partnership over transitional services. will help to create the type of resource chain that will be of the greatest use to somebody of the disposition in question.
One of the greatest challenges in public partnership orientation is the inevitable diversity of structure, mission and interest amongst enlisted agencies. The responsibility falls upon the establishment of a planning team to identify and understand each of these agencies. As the team begin to mount a strategy for inclining cooperative interaction, the planners from interacting public agencies would be significantly benefited by a clear understanding of what each agency in the cooperative partnership avails with regard to goals, resources and ideology or policy orientation.
As a planning team leader, one takes on the responsibility of assessing in what capacity different agencies may have the ability to contribute to a partnership. In the case of a student with learning disabilities, for example, where it has been determined that one will require in-class assistance in the completion of his general high-school education, we will need to evaluate the relevance and compatibility of the agencies that have been compiled as possible places where such a case might be served.
Preplanning evaluation should elucidate such possible routes of agreement proficiency as the pairing of naturally inclined organizations. The partnerships is significantly strengthened by a determination that such intuitive connections can be utilized to enable disabled students to navigate the transition by finding support in stable and interconnected entities.
Additionally, it can be determined during the preplanning step of the agreement that certain agencies considered potential in the community assembly phase may actually be ill-suited to accommodate a public partnership. For example, an organization may lack the human relations resources or the public motives to provide any support to local schools. Likewise, it may prove to be the case that an organization does not provide any specific services that may be of use in transitioning the learning disabled. Thus, in comprising a strategy that responds directly to an individual's needs, the preplanning phase is crucial to constructing a program which is well-suited to its subject.
In order to determine what part each invested agency may play and to what degree each party might benefit another, it will be necessary to determine what needs, interests or obstacles each agency may have in ably participating. For the sake of all parties involved, the planning phase will be directly concerned with establishing the presence of a clear relationship between transition needs, the overarching goals of the partnership and the motivating goals and principles of all partnered agencies. Such needs are determinant to what degree agencies understand the nature, purpose and benefits of public partnership to the functionality of transitional services. Likewise, the agency partnership planners should determine to what extent improvements must be made in order to help such agencies create relationships with students and families eligible for their services.
Truly, there do exist a number of resources available to individuals in this need group, and even a wide array of private organizations that are willing and ready to help. But a gap between the financial institutions and the people whom they might wish to target with such an effort might be impossible to bridge without direct facilitation from an oversight party. The interagency planning team should be prepared to determine and isolate such a need, thus beginning the orientation of addressing it through personnel recruitment, organizational training or other means of responding to the intercession between the suitability of an agency to participate meaningfully and its resource capacity to do so.
By assessing the needs of agencies aligned in this effort, a planning team can also identify the resources which do exist amongst those involved...
The inventory of personnel, funding strength, educational resource, community outreach programs and other such assets can be used to create a distribution that addresses places where need has already been identified.
This is a process which can be crucial to establishing lasting relationships with agencies while simultaneously equipping them to address the transitional needs of disabled students. The planning team, though, must play a key role in delegating this distribution. Truly, it is very unusual for a partnership to develop betwixt agencies wherein resource sharing occurs immediately and with fluidity. Instead, this type of trust in the shared interests defined must develop as the partnership matures. This points to the importance of a continued acknowledgement of the steps involved in the agreement process. Certainly, as organizations become more comfortable with and oriented toward interdependence, it will become increasingly clearer in what ways resources may be shared.
This comfort allows organizations to recognize opportunities within the partnership to share, for instance, personnel that might assist learning disabled students in maintaining a balance between academic and extra-curricular activities.
With needs and resources evaluated, the partnership can begin the execution of a suitable mission statement for the agreement. The plan for partnership must be an actionable one, informed by the previous steps in the process. Thus, needs, resource sharing decisions and specifically identified relationships between naturally partnering agencies will all play a part in creating an approach to interagency transitional planning.
In this phase of the agreement process, a partnership will be focused on crafting a written mission which explicitly lays out the purpose of the transitional planning project. In addition, this point of planning should involve an articulation of the joint responsibilities to which all participating agencies are beholden. This is also the correct juncture at which to define the respective and collective roles and responsibilities for individual agencies.
The planning phase, for example, might assess that all agencies participating share the responsibility of providing the student with one-on-one advocacy in navigating available resources. Alternately, this phase may also assess that the responsibility for helping the indivdual complete his general education can best be facilitated with the contributions of an academic tutorship resources in a program cooperative with his public school curriculum. This points the way to prescribing the correct course of transitional services to be utilized by individual students. We can see how the coordination between an individualized learning program and the various agencies with which a school should be fostering relations can be central in considering the student's goals and channeling them through the proper settings.
All this stated, the management structure of a cooperative public partnership such as this must acknowledge a number of difficult realities. First and foremost, the diversity of agencies will require a diversification of strategy. Creating effective collaboration between such groups will depend heavily on a pragmatic application of natural relationships such as those inherently occurring between community outreach programs, housing assistance agencies and public schools. The commonality in needs of those eligible for such agencies implies an inherent path to interactivity.
This points the way to a managerial style that is focused on bringing together personnel and goals under a single-minded organizational vision. Power imbalance and resource contribution inequality should be relegated to irrelevance in genuinely attempting to attain collective goals to do this, a management may find that it must frequently evaluate the agreement under pretenses of that which enables effective collaboration in a context apart from agency's individual orientation and attitude.
The adoption plan of the partnership will be crafted to facilitate the unique needs of each individual student. Taking into account the information provided by the Individualized Education Program (IEP) and the educational structure which it facilitates, the plan will train agencies to address in coordination with one another the various goals, strengths, needs and traits of all students.
This kind of articulation of goals can be part of a very meaningful process. With the IEP designed to focus attention of the unique case of each individual's education, it is a vital link between school and the real world. By taking a vested interest in moving this disabled student from his public school education into a hospitable higher-education or occupation setting, the IEP should serve as a liaison between the student and the multitude of agencies for whose services he could be eligible.
There are a number of inevitable barriers which are likely to be faced in creating an…
