Communicating Interagency Relationships and Collaborative Linkages for Exceptional Students (CIRCLES) is a transition-planning service delivery model designed to guide schools in implementing interagency collaboration. This study examined the impact of CIRCLES on students’ self-determination and participation in individualized education program (IEP) meetings. Forty-four schools located in the Southeast United States were assigned randomly into either the CIRCLES or business-as-usual (BAU) conditions, and 877 high school students with disabilities were included in the analyses. Two-level hierarchical linear models, with students at Level 1 and schools at Level 2, examined the effectiveness of CIRCLES. Results indicated students in the CIRCLES condition had higher levels of self-determination (Hedges’s g = .06–.38) and greater IEP participation (Hedges’s g = .77). Implications for practice and suggestions for future research are provided.

BACKGROUND: Best practices in transition planning include interagency collaboration during the planning process. While IDEA 2004 requires interagency collaboration in the IEP process, getting all the right people to the table can be difficult. OBJECTIVE: To investigate stakeholder perceptions of interagency collaboration resulting from Communicating Interagency Relationships and Collaborative Linkages for Exceptional Students (CIRCLES). METHODS: Using qualitative and quantitative methodologies, we explored stakeholders' interagency collaboration experiences with CIRCLES. RESULTS: Data indicated high levels of interagency collaboration and satisfaction from students, parents, teachers, and agency personnel. CONCLUSIONS: CIRCLES may help transition personnel overcome many of the barriers to successful interagency collaboration.

Many educators in public schools in the United States experience challenges in meeting the unique needs of the growing population of English learners who must simultaneously attain academic skills while acquiring English language proficiency. Such unique needs intensify for English learners with reading disabilities. Morphological awareness is key to vocabulary knowledge, which is an essential area of literacy instruction. This article provides justification for the use of explicit morphology instruction and offers a structure for developing a computer-assisted morphology instructional program to increase morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge of English learners with reading disabilities.

School-Wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (SWPBIS) is an empirically based, multifaceted systems approach consisting of school-wide and individual interventions delivered across three levels of support to improve socially valued outcomes (Office of Special Education Programs Technical Assistance Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, 2015). Research has shown that schools implementing SWPBIS have fewer office discipline referrals (Vincent, Swain-Bradway, Tobin, & May, 2011) and are less likely to use exclusionary discipline practices (Bradshaw, Mitchell, & Leaf, 2010). Check-In Check-Out (CICO) and function-based selfmonitoring (FBSM) are two interventions that have been used within SWPBIS, as a Tier II and a Tier III intervention, respectively, with promising results in supporting the behavioral needs of students (

This column provides brief summaries of transition-related articles published in 2012 in other professional journals. The 44 articles included descriptive, experimental, and qualitative research as well as program descriptions, conceptual papers, and practitioner pieces. All areas of Kohler’s Taxonomy for Transition Programming were addressed: family involvement, interagency collaboration, program structure, student development, and student-focused planning.