What is the practice?
Communicating Interagency Relationships and Collaborative Linkages for Exceptional Students (CIRCLES) is a collaborative service delivery model designed to guide schools in implementing interagency collaboration across three teams, including the Community-Level Team, School-Level Team, and the Individualized Education Program (IEP) team. The focus of CIRCLES is to facilitate student involvement and leadership throughout the transition planning process to help ensure youth with disabilities are connected with the necessary services and supports in high school to support their transition into postschool life.
The Community-Level Team comprises administrators and supervisors of each agency (e.g., local education agency, vocational rehabilitation) and other community partners (e.g., employers, Chamber of Commerce, faith-based organizations). This team works to solve problems or barriers that students with disabilities might face in accessing community supports, employment, and postsecondary education to ensure these youth can fully engage within their communities when graduating or exiting high school. The Community-Level Team is responsible for appointing a direct service representative from their agency, business, or organization to serve on the School Team.
The School-Level Team comprises direct service providers from each agency, business, or organization represented on the Community-Level Team. These individuals are those that might traditionally be invited to attend a student’s IEP meeting. Instead of inviting these individuals to attend every student’s IEP meeting, district staff responsible for convening CIRCLES meetings invite them to attend one full-day or half-day meeting per month during the school year to learn from students about their strengths, needs, areas of interest, and postschool goals. Special education teachers prepare students to be actively engaged in these meetings by presenting their strengths, needs, areas of interest, and postschool goals, which promotes student self-determination and advocacy. The School-Level Team allows time for questions to be answered by agency, business, or organization members, reducing the amount of time it takes for these individuals to attend every student's IEP team meeting. Minutes of each School-Level Team meeting are distributed to members of the School-Level Team and IEP team via the special education teacher.
The IEP team is the final team in the CIRCLES multi-team approach. After the School-Level Team meeting, special education teachers take minutes and any decisions made back to the IEP meeting, and the transition component of the IEP is crafted based on the services agreed upon by the School-Level Team. This process enables the IEP team to write the other components of the IEP with the end goals of the student in mind.
Where has it been implemented?
- 44 schools located in urban, suburban, and rural settings.
Where is the best place to find out how to do this practice?
- For more information on CIRCLES:
References used to establish this evidence base:
- Flowers, C., Test, D. W., Povenmire-Kirk, T. C., Diegelmann, K. M., Bunch-Crump, K., Kemp-Inman, A., & Goodnight, C. I. (2018). A demonstration model of interagency collaboration for students with disabilities: A multilevel approach. The Journal of Special Education, 51(4), 211–221. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022466917720764
