Collaboration in the context of appalachia: the case of Cassie.

A broad perspective on child development is important to understanding collaboration in special education. Bronfenbrenner's ecological model of human development provides a backdrop to this case study of collaboration on behalf of Cassie, a 4-year-old child with disabilities in a small West Virginia community. The story of Cassie and her family is used to examine special education in a sociocultural context. The implications of the research for special education in general and professional development in particular are discussed.

Cassie

Meeting Cassie for the first time is a memorable experience. At 4 years of age, she is tall and slender. Her mixed European and African American heritage is evident in her wiry hair and brown-hazel eyes. Cassie is not at all shy and readily engages with others, even unfamiliar adults. She wears thick glasses fastened at the back with an elastic strap to keep them from sliding off her face. The strap does not help all that much. Her glasses are often smudged and smeared, and she frequently pushes them back up her nose, especially when she is thinking or trying to communicate.

Cassie is often trying to communicate. She clearly enjoys social interaction and is delighted with opportunities to play with other children or adults, even those who are unfamiliar to her. Her speech is mostly unintelligible, and it is difficult to decipher her meanings until you come to understand her utterances and gestural language over time. She is eager to help you out with this. Cassie throws her whole body into the task of trying to express herself. She flings her arms wide, squats, and then jumps to emphasize feeling. She uses facial expression frequently, grimacing, raising her eyebrows, pursing her lips, and sticking out her tongue in apparent efforts to convey what her speech leaves unclear. Conversations with Cassie can be exhausting, but they are seldom boring. Although occasionally frustrated by her lack of success in communicating, she is persistent in her efforts and finds humor in your mistaken attempts to respond to her.

Cassie attends a preschool classroom for children from low-income families at Brewster Elementary School, a Pre-K-8 school of 535 students located in a small community in Rainelle County, West Virginia. She has been identified by Rainelle County School District as having developmental delays in several areas and receives speech and language, occupational, and physical therapy while at school. Cassie is also seen by a preschool special educator three times a week at school. She and her family receive home visits every other week from a Rainelle County School District home-school coordinator, who provides Cassie and her family with activities designed to prepare her for kindergarten next year. The six school district professionals who see Cassie sometimes work with her in her preschool classroom. Most often in their work with Cassie, they take her out of the classroom and work with her individually in the hallway or in a small group in an office down the corridor.

Cassie and her family receive educational and social services from three different community organizations in Rainelle County. They are enrolled in home-based Head Start and receive a home visit once a week from a Head Start home visitor. Cassie and her mother (Martha) also attend Head Start socialization groups twice a month, riding the Head Start bus together with the other morns and children to Brewster Elementary, where the Head Start classroom is located. A caseworker from the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Services (WVDHHS) also visits the family at home once a week. Cassie is a patient at the Rainelle County Public Health Clinic. She has frequently visited the clinic during the past year with her family as they attempted to understand and address her developmental difficulties (see Table 1).

The sheer number and complexity of services received by Cassie and her family serves to underscore the importance of collaboration between practitioners and families in the provision of effective services designed to optimize outcomes for children with developmental delays or disabilities. Although Cassie's case may be exceptionally complex in this regard, the involvement of multiple individuals and agencies in the lives of children with disabilities and their families is not unusual and has been a frequent topic in the literature in recent decades (Desimone & Gallagher, 1995; Dettmer, Thurston, & Dyck, 2002; Gallagher, 1999; Hanson & Widerstrom, 1993; Kagan, 1991, 1993; Kagan & Pritchard, 1999; Mostert, 1998). While there is ambiguity in the term collaboration, in general it is considered a more global term than coordination or cooperation, which usually refer to individual efforts to work together. Kagan (1991) defined collaboration as "organizational and interorganizational structures where resources, power and authority are shared and where people are brought together to achieve common goals that could not be accomplished by a single individual or organization independently" (p. 3).