Description:
Person-Centered Planning is a collaborative process that places the student and family at the center of decisions about individualized supports, services, and future goals. Rather than beginning with deficits, labels, or service availability, the process identifies the student's strengths, interests, preferences, relationships, needs, and aspirations. The student, family, school team, and other invited supporters work together to develop a shared vision and identify meaningful steps toward achieving it.
Within Tier 3, Person-Centered Planning helps ensure that behavioral and educational supports reflect what matters most to the student and family. It promotes shared decision-making, identifies existing strengths and natural supports, and helps coordinate school and community resources around individualized goals.
Importance:
Students with intensive needs may receive support from multiple professionals, agencies, or systems. Without a person-centered approach, planning can become fragmented, overly focused on problems, or driven by the priorities of individual providers. Person-Centered Planning helps teams maintain a shared focus on the student's quality of life, voice, belonging, and meaningful participation.
When students and families have authentic opportunities to shape decisions, plans are more likely to reflect their priorities, build on existing strengths, and be feasible within their everyday lives. The process also helps teams identify gaps in services, coordinate responsibilities, and establish goals that extend beyond reducing challenging behavior to improving meaningful outcomes.
Critical Features:
- Student voice and choice: The student's communication, preferences, interests, and goals guide planning, with appropriate supports for participation.
- Family partnership: Families are respected as essential partners and experts on their child's strengths, needs, culture, and experiences.
- Strengths-based perspective: Planning emphasizes capabilities, relationships, interests, and opportunities rather than defining the student by challenges.
- Meaningful, individualized goals: Goals reflect what matters to the student and family and support participation, independence, relationships, and quality of life.
- Collaborative decision-making: Relevant school staff, service providers, and people chosen by the student or family contribute to planning.
- Action-oriented planning: The process identifies specific next steps, responsible individuals, needed resources, and ways to monitor progress.
- Ongoing review: Plans evolve as student priorities, needs, circumstances, and progress change.
Implementation Tips:
- Begin by asking the student and family what is important to them, what is working well, and what they would like to see change.
- Provide accessible ways for the student to participate, such as visuals, communication supports, advance preparation, choices, or a trusted facilitator.
- Invite individuals who have meaningful relationships with the student, including natural supports identified by the student or family.
- Use strengths-based questions, such as “When does the student feel most successful?” and “Who does the student turn to for support?”
- Develop a shared vision that extends beyond immediate behavioral concerns and includes relationships, belonging, participation, independence, and future aspirations.
- Identify priorities collaboratively rather than allowing professional recommendations or available services to determine the plan automatically.
- Translate priorities into observable goals and concrete actions. Identify who will do what, when the action will occur, and how the team will know whether it is helping.
- Coordinate Person-Centered Planning with existing processes, such as IEP meetings, PBSP reviews, mental health services, or transition planning, when appropriate. Avoid creating unnecessary parallel meetings.
- Establish a regular review process and revisit the student's and family's priorities as progress and circumstances change.
Websites for Additional Information:
Description:
Wraparound is an individualized, team-based planning and care coordination process designed to support children and youth with complex behavioral, emotional, mental health, and other needs across home, school, and community settings. The process brings together the student and family, natural supports, school personnel, and relevant community service providers to develop and implement a coordinated plan based on the family's strengths, needs, culture, and priorities. Wraparound is not a single intervention or service; it is a structured process for organizing people, services, and supports around a shared vision.
Within Tier 3, Wraparound helps teams coordinate multiple systems of care, reduce fragmented or conflicting interventions, and develop strategies that address the student's needs across environments. Guided by principles such as family voice and choice, individualized planning, natural supports, collaboration, and outcomes-based decision-making, the process includes team preparation, plan development, implementation, and transition.
Importance:
Students with intensive needs may interact with multiple systems, including education, behavioral health, mental health, child welfare, and community-based services. When these systems operate independently, families may be left to coordinate services, navigate conflicting recommendations, or manage gaps in support. Wraparound creates a coordinated process in which the family and team share responsibility for developing, implementing, and evaluating a unified plan.
Wraparound also recognizes that meaningful and sustainable outcomes depend on more than formal services. By building on family strengths, natural relationships, and community resources, the process can strengthen support networks, improve continuity across settings, and help students remain connected to their families, schools, and communities. The ultimate goal is to improve quality of life and meaningful participation while building the family's capacity to sustain progress over time.
Critical Features:
- Family voice and choice: The student and family actively guide decisions, priorities, and the development of the plan.
- Team-based collaboration: The team includes individuals selected with the family who can contribute to shared goals and coordinated support.
- Natural supports: Family members, friends, mentors, coaches, and other trusted community members are included when desired by the student and family.
- Strengths-based and individualized planning: Strategies build on the student's and family's strengths, culture, preferences, resources, and identified needs.
- Cross-system coordination: School personnel and community providers communicate and coordinate their efforts while maintaining appropriate confidentiality and professional responsibilities.
- Outcomes-based decision-making: Goals are linked to observable or measurable indicators, and progress is reviewed to guide adjustments.
- Unconditional commitment: The team continues to work collaboratively when strategies are unsuccessful, needs change, or barriers arise.
- Planned transition: The team prepares for changes in services and gradually transitions responsibility to sustainable natural and community supports when appropriate.
Implementation Tips:
- Start with family engagement. Explain the purpose and process of Wraparound, listen to the family's story, identify immediate concerns, and establish trust before moving directly into problem-solving.
- Develop a shared vision. Ask the student and family what they want life to look like when things are going well. Use that vision to guide team priorities and decisions.
- Identify the right team members. Invite school personnel, relevant service providers, and natural supports identified by the family. Ensure the student and family have meaningful opportunities to shape team membership.
- Assign a facilitator or care coordinator. Identify who will coordinate meetings, support communication, monitor action steps, and help the team maintain momentum.
- Develop one coordinated plan. Establish a small number of meaningful priorities, measurable outcomes, specific strategies, responsible individuals, and timelines. Align the plan with existing school and community plans rather than creating unnecessary duplication.
- Create a crisis and safety plan when needed. Identify early warning signs, proactive supports, communication procedures, responsibilities, and steps to take if a safety concern occurs.
- Clarify roles and information-sharing procedures. Establish how team members will communicate, what information is necessary to coordinate services, and how consent, privacy, and applicable legal requirements will be addressed.
- Use regular team meetings and follow-up. Review progress on action steps, identify barriers, celebrate successes, and revise strategies when the plan is not producing the intended outcomes.
- Monitor implementation and outcomes. Examine whether agreed-upon supports are being delivered and whether the student and family are experiencing meaningful improvements. Include student and family feedback alongside relevant school and service data.
- Plan for sustainability. Identify the natural supports, skills, routines, and community resources that will help maintain progress when the intensity of formal Wraparound coordination decreases.
Websites for Additional Information: