Interagency Collaboration: A View from the Rural Principal's Chair

As schools and youth-serving agencies struggle to meet the needs of at-risk children and families, interagency collaboration is being proposed as an effective, efficient means of service delivery. However, most writing on interagency collaboration has been from the perspective of service providers, not schools, and has given little consideration to the special concerns of collaboration in rural communities. This paper examines rural issues in agency collaboration from the perspective of one principal in a rural school. A literature review describes three models of the relationship between service organizations (referral-based, cooperative, collaborative); discusses schools as service organizations; and emphasizes the central importance of the school principal in leading change toward collaboration. Multiple in-depth interviews were conducted with a high school principal in a small midwestern town. The principal was regarded as innovative and caring by peers and was not currently involved in formal restructuring of services for at-risk families and children. The interviews discussed school support services to high-risk students and families, the school's contacts with other service organizations, interactions between the school and the area education agency, barriers to interagency communication, gaps in services available locally, confidentiality issues, the flexibility and informality of the school's current system, and problems of collaboration related to "turf" issues and lack of resources. (SV)