Assessing Transition Services for Handicapped Youth: A Cooperative Interagency Approach

Abstract

The major purpose of this article is to present a cooperative interagency approach for assessing the effectiveness of programs and services provided to facilitate the transition of handicapped students from school to adult community living. Section one briefly reviews the concerns that have made transition a priority educational issue, discusses the need to address the issue of transition from a cooperative interagency approach, and outlines the barriers that impede interagency collaboration. Section two describes the experience of an interagency transition planning team and the team decisions that led to the development of a model for cooperative interagency assessment of transition services/programs. In section three the model's conceptual and operational framework, its advantages, and its generalizability are discussed.