Early Head Start (EHS) is a federally-funded, community-based program that provides comprehensive child and family development services to low-income pregnant women and families with children under the age of 3. The mission of EHS is to support healthy prenatal outcomes and enhance the intellectual, social, and emotional development of infants and…

This report examines state and school district implementation of the Education for Homeless Children and Youth (EHCY) program, based on surveys of state EHCY coordinators and district homeless liaisons and analysis of extant data. The study included state and school district surveys to examine program implementation during the 2010-11 school year;…

One objective of the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) School Improvement Grants (SIG) and Race to the Top (RTT) program is to help states enhance their capacity to support the turnaround of low-performing schools. This capacity may be important, given how difficult it is to produce substantial and sustained achievement gains in low-performing…

Interagency communication and collaboration is a key principle and practice in addressing the unmet educational needs of youth in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. When child-serving agencies communicate and work with each other, and are committed to coordinating services and supports for the youth and families they serve, they…

Educational reform in the United States is perpetually evolving. Much of the recent reforms have concentrated on high-stakes testing and assessment, but a parallel effort has been emerging in the field of vocational and career education. Prompted partly by federal legislation--most recently by the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act…

This paper highlights several current collaborative activities of the National Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center (NECTAC). There are many specific examples of TA (Technical Assistance) collaborations that take place on a regular basis; the seven examples presented here were selected to represent different types of collaboration. The…

This report focuses on the seven original Youth Transition Demonstration (YTD) projects selected for funding in 2003. Three of the original seven projects were selected for a national random assignment evaluation in 2005; however, this report only focuses on program operations prior to joining the random assignment evaluation for the three…

The purpose of this report is to provide policymakers, primarily at the federal and state levels, with information about youth with disabilities in foster care, so that policymakers can begin to understand the characteristics of this population; the challenges they face; how they fare with regard to safety, permanency, self-determination and…

The Communities of Practice approach offers state agency personnel a lens for exploring the human aspects of problems. They can be used as a technical assistance approach for bringing together multiple stakeholders to address complex issues facing special education. The IDEA Partnership has pioneered the use of a website for its national…

Elements of a successful Head Start program are described. These elements are provision of comprehensive services, parent involvement and family support, a commitment to meeting local needs, training and technical assistance support, and use of a collaborative approach. Anecdotes about two Head Start parents and a former Head Start participant are…

Six Indian Education Technical Assistance Centers (IETACs) provide technical assistance to American Indian and Alaska Native education programs funded by Title V grants from the Office of Indian Education (OIE). This study examines the services provided by the IETACs and identifies factors that influence their effectiveness. Data were collected…

Project STEPS (Sequenced Transition to Education in the Public Schools) was a federally funded demonstration grant to develop a community-wide interagency process for the transition of children with disabilities from preschool to the public schools. Participants were the local public schools and seven programs serving preschool children with…

"For the Common Good" was designed as a statewide project to facilitate the formation of local interagency linkage teams throughout Ohio to improve services to at-risk youth and adults. The state team conducted three workshops during which 36 local interagency linkage teams were trained. A major portion of each workshop was set aside for…

This federally funded Delaware project was designed to provide systematic, periodic consultation and technical assistance statewide to staff serving children and youth who are deaf-blind; provide inservice training activities for staff; provide at least two statewide parent meetings; and develop and conduct summer training institutes on major…

This monograph presents the proceedings of two symposia on assistive technology for people with disabilities in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, the Federated States of Micronesia, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Republic of the Marshall Islands, and Palau. Following an overview, Sections 1 and 2 contain the presentations and…