Wraparound services: a community approach to keep even severely disabled children in local schools

School Administrator, March, 2003 by Rita A. Stevenson

Q: Does the wraparound approach suggest that youths committing crimes never be put in detention?

Youths involved in wraparound should be exposed to natural consequences when they commit crimes. Those involved in wraparound need to work closely with the juvenile justice system to ensure that this happens. However, with wraparound, the child and the family team are in partnership with the judge in designing appropriate alternatives to detention when possible.

Q: How does one obtain sufficient staff to do all the jobs that come with a wraparound?

Most communities that do wraparound have not experienced a problem recruiting staff. Much of the recruitment is done through the private sector, through word of mouth.

Creative recruitment strategies include accessing substitute teacher lists, using university students and networking with church groups. In an effort to avoid trouble with labor laws, it is recommended the local Labor Department be brought in early to help devise ways of legally hiring the staff needed for wraparound.

Q: Do wraparound services increase the parents' tendency to overly depend on the system and even cake advantage of it?

The reality is the vast majority of parents do not want to be in need of services and want to be independent. The experience of communities doing extensive wraparound services indicates parents and students do not take advantage of the process.

Flexible Service Delivery

BY JIM SURBER

When you walk into some school buildings in Illinois, things may look a little different. You may notice the custodian listening to a 1st grader read to him on a bench outside the classroom. Or you might pass volunteers in the hallway, talking quietly with their assigned student Reading Buddies.

In Illinois an innovative service delivery model known as the Flexible Service Delivery System, or Flex, has been in place for seven years, enabling increasing numbers of students with academic and behavioral challenges to succeed at school. The goal of Flex is to shift the focus from categorizing and labeling children with disabilities to a system that provides necessary modifications and adaptations to make more children successful in general education.

Flex focuses on functional assessment of student needs, in part by providing more useful information to classroom teachers and through the development of classroom-based interventions.

A collaborative problem-solving team, which includes parents, teachers, related services personnel and an administrator, is responsible for identifying the needs of our diverse learners. But the principal is critical to the success of Flex by assuming responsibility for setting a positive climate and being available to allocate needed building resources when innovative interventions are recommended by the problem-solving team. The building principal typically assigns the teams.

One elementary school principal summed up her experiences in a report to the board of education this way: "Flex is not necessarily an easier way of providing services to our at-risk students but it clearly is a better way."