C2P2 Family Leadership in Inclusive Education Webinar - Inclusion: Supporting All Abilities of Students Learning Together

Transcript

> Kathy Miller: Hi, everybody, welcome to tonight's webinar, supporting all abilities of students learning together. My name is Kathy Miller, and I'm the Director of Community Supports and Services here at the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University. Our project, Competence and Confidence, Partners in Policymaking Family Leadership for Inclusive Education in Non-Traditional Schools is brought to you by the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University. Funding from the project comes from the Pennsylvania Developmental Disabilities Council.

Our project, which we fondly call C2P2 Family Leadership in Inclusive Education is designed for families of students with disabilities who are educated in home school, cyber charter schools, charter, excuse me, private schools, and parochial schools. Whoops. Okay, excuse me just a minute; this doesn't seem to be changing. Okay, thank you everyone for your patience. Let me tell you a little bit about C2P2/Family Leadership. The goal is to create a network of family leaders who will work together with educators and administrators to champion inclusive practices for children with disabilities in the nontraditional school community. Our projects activities includes these webinars, tonight being one of them, our second webinar in the series, guidance and technical assistance from trained parent consultants, and annual opportunity for networking with other families to help achieve true inclusion for children, and online resources.

Tonight's webinar, Inclusion: Supporting All Abilities of Students Learning Together is presented by Pennsylvania Education for All Coalition Family Members, which you may know as PEAC. We're very pleased that PEAC is one of our main collaborators in this project, and delighted that tonight you're really in for a treat, because you're going to hear from a great panel of family members. Diane Perry is the president of PEAC; Karen Salomon is one of the parent consultants, as is Natalie Weiters.

Future webinars, we'll be having two this coming year, well actually in 2014. On January 22, we're collaborating with the PIAT Center, who is the Parent Information and Technical Assistance Center in Western Pennsylvania, as well as Education Law Center in Pennsylvania, and we're going to be presenting a session on special education rules and regulations for charter, private, parochial and home schools, so this is something for all of those of you would like to learn about what specifically those rules and regulations, the laws are pertaining to your schools, and inclusive practices, and all of those wonderful regulations that will really give the knowledge to be equipped to understand and advocate for your child's rights, this will be a session that you wouldn't want to miss.

As well as on March 19, we're going to do a session on Teamwork for Success: The Parent/Professional Relationship. Again, a really important piece where you can really learn how to partner with professionals, the educators, and administrators in your schools.

We've already done one webinar, Creating a Vision for your Child's Future, and this will be archived and available for you the first week of November. This was a very successful webinar that was first done in May 2013. It was originally done in May by Tim Gruesel. He's a wonderful speaker, so we will be notifying everybody who is on this webinar to be able to access that. And that's what I just told them, right?

So, just a little more information about C2P2/Family Leadership. One of the important components of this project is that anyone who has come to our webinars will be able to have some guidance and technical assistance from training parent consultants. As I mentioned already, the Institute on Disabilities is collaborating with Pennsylvania's Education for All Coalition (PEAC). Parent consultants will be matched with families participating in these trainings, anyone who needs guidance and technical assistance. We will be giving you the name of Cathy Roccia-Meier at the end of this, which you will be able to look for again, and you will be able to contact Cathy and tell her that you would like some of the technical assistance from our very well-trained and well-informed PEAC parent consultants.

In May of 2014, a face-to-face networking event will be held for eligible C2P2/Family Leadership families. The Institute on Disabilities has a long history over two decades of providing leadership development to families and individuals with disabilities, and we have close to 400 graduates of our leadership development training, and aside from the great information that people learn from attending the session about the rules and the laws and the evidence-based practices, people tell us consistently that the most important aspect of going to these trainings is really networking with other families who are in similar situations. That networking is so valuable when we wrote this grant to the Developmental Disabilities Counsel, we recognized that we really needed to add a session where people can join together, so please look for that information that will be coming up, as to the location of that, and we encourage people who are taking in the webinars to really come and participate in that.

So, online resources that I mentioned, we do have a few of those. One is a Ning group. You'll see the link right there to join. It's a closed online resource that will have some different resources, and you'll be able to post some questions in a very private manner, and get some good information about things pertaining to inclusive education and nontraditional schools.

Another piece that we have put together is a Facebook group, and you see the link right on your screen there. You would just click Join Group, and your request would be accepted in a few days, and you can post and read comments there. So, we encourage those of you who want to get on line and join us in that way; that that would be two of the ways to get some more information, and really begin a dialogue with other like-minded families.

So, again, the goal is to create a network of family leaders, who will work together with educators and administrators to champion inclusive practices for children with disabilities in nontraditional school communities. And there is Cathy Roccia-Meier's phone contact information. She is our Family Education Coordinator here at the Institute on Disabilities. She is a family member of a young man who happened to experience a disability, and is very, very well versed in the laws and evidence-based practices, so I urge you to contact Cathy because she would be the contact for information pertaining to getting matched with a parent consultant, or getting online and becoming one of our members of Facebook or Ning. So, please feel free to give her a call.

Just some housekeeping issues for tonight's session, when you have a question, please use the hands icon on the right side of your screen to be recognized. Just click that if you have a question. We will be having, if you have a question at any time, please feel free to do so, but the one way that you need to do that, as I said is to click on the hand icon that you can see on the right side of your screen, and then you can either, if you have a speaker on your computer, you can speak through your computer, or you can use the chat option. I want to let you know, everyone know that you will all be muted. We will unmute you if you have a question, and at the end of the session, what we're going to do for folks who may want to ask an anonymous question and not be recorded, because this session is being recorded, so it will be archived for people who weren't able to join us this evening. But, if you want to ask a question that is confidential, we will do that at the end of the session. And again, we assure you that those, that question and answer period will not be recorded.

It's very important to us that you complete a very brief evaluation after this session, and you can go to That link is right there, and you will be able to access our evaluation.

So, without further ado, your screen will be blank momentarily, but you're going to have the great pleasure of having our three panelists talk to you about inclusion of all children in school. So thank you very much.

[ Silence ]

> Diane Perry: Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us tonight. As I do to Kathy and Cathy here at the Institute of Disability for working with us, and we're very happy and proud to be able to bring you this module tonight. Inclusion: Supporting All Abilities of Students Learning Together.

Forgive me, this is my first webinar. We did do a practice session, but I'm going to, you know, see how I can do on my second time around here. Let's see. We did have our project coordinator scheduled to be with us tonight, and that would be the proud mother of little Sophie in this girl scout troop picture, and her mother, Jen, Jennifer Schrad, who is our project coordinator at PEAC, she unfortunately is having some medical issues right now, and was unable to join us tonight. So, I have the pleasure to bring you Sophie's story throughout our slides tonight, and we wanted to first start off with Sophie and her Girl Scout troop. And, this brings a lot of significance. We thought it would be great way to start our training tonight, because Sophie is in the first grade, and she is fully included in her elementary school, but she also involved in her local Girl Scout troop, and that is then right there. They just recently participated in a buddy walk, and through that buddy walk, all her girl scout troop rallied around Sophie, and they even featured them in the local newspaper as Sophie's Team, or I forget the whole, I think it might have just been Sophie's Team, and they rallied around her for the buddy walk for people with Down syndrome. And so, Sophie was very proud, as you can see her in the front there. And, actually, that's her sister also. So, it's her friends and everyone there with Sophie. And, I probably didn't give her story justice, but hopefully, her mother is proud from what I remember [laughter] and, now a little bit background.

I'm just give you bit of background about who PEAC is and what we do. As Kathy first introduced us, we're the Pennsylvania Education for All Coalition, and PEAC has been around for over 12 years now, and what we do is, we're all about collaboration. And, we collaborate towards inclusive experiences, so not only does inclusion happen within schools, but it's in your community. It's in your church. It's everywhere that you go. It's at the playground, you know, and inclusive experiences are a natural part of your day as anybody else experiences with any ability that you bring to the table. And what we believe. PEAC believes that all children should be successfully educated together in their neighborhood schools within the general education curriculum. And what I always said when I talked about this is that you need to have the right support and services along with that. And, we all know, in this lovely state of Pennsylvania, that that looks very different, in every school, in every district, in every building. It's very different. Should it be different? A little bit, but we're going to get into a couple more slides a little later about the law and what are your rights. But, those rights, those supports and services are very critical to the success of any student who is going to be educated in their school.

And, not only myself, but the others will be here to tell you a little bit about our own stories, and our own journeys, and some of that will be, you know, what we were able to work with, and how we were able to work within the schools, and not maybe sometime. Hopefully, you'll leave here tonight knowing that not only is inclusive practice happening within the school, but again, it's all about the community and that collaboration.

So, what exactly does PEAC do? We provided individualized support. We provide training and technical assistance. And then, next to that, who do we provide that to? We provide that to parents and families, educators, universities, and self-advocates.

I see we have a question, we'll get to that in a minute, I think.

Okay, PEAC also has the Parent Consultant Network. We are able to have a Parent Consultant Network because we do have a grant through the Pennsylvania Developmental Disabilities Counsel, and due to that grant, we are able to bring our parent consultants, who are parents who have been there and done it, and they are the experts. They are the experts that we have within PEAC that do the work that we do. So, we recruit those parents, we train them. We then support them, and then we utilize their gift, because each parent has very unique experiences that they bring to the table, and that's what makes them the experts. And, these are all parents of children who receive special education services. They're committed to inclusive education for all children, and that is strengthened by the collective wisdom of all of these parents who have been there. And, we support them, and we do compensate them for their time.

That's why we are very proud to have that grant through the Developmental Disabilities Council. So, here's my family [laughter]. Myself, and my husband, and David. And, that's David going to his senior prom. And, this is a very special picture to start with because it's kind of like, you know, David is 20 now. So, now that he's, you know, he's 20, he's been through the whole school system, and he actually walked with his class, it's kind of a pivotal picture to talk about our journey. You know, there's David, going to his senior prom with all his friends that he went to school with. And, for us, throughout David's journey, inclusion was not always easy. And, I will always tell every family that it's a lot of work; it's a lot of work, and you need a lot of people around you, and you need to know a lot of stuff [laughter], and PEAC is here to support those families with that. And, you're going to have high notes, and you're going to have low notes all throughout life, but this picture is very pivotal, because not only did he go to senior prom, but he walked with his class, and every ounce that we went through over the years; cheers, anger, you know, whatever you go through when your children go through school was all well worth it. And, that's what that picture shows, and that's what that means today.

So, tonight, we're going to be bringing you the Introduction to Inclusive Education. PEAC has many modules, and all of our parent consultants are able to bring various modules to; that's part of the training that we do, to schools, colleges, and universities. We do their structuring, and so these modules, some of them are used there, and some are used just in various locations. We are going to have, we're hosting a conference November 15 and 16, and that will be, you can go to our website for more information. And, our information will be on here a little bit later, but that is going to be a great conference about relationships, and where do those relationships, or what does that mean, in school, out in the community, so it's going to be a packed event for two days, November 15 and 16. So, check us out.

Tonight though, Introduction to Inclusive Education, we kind of went over a little bit of the welcoming, and you'll be meeting the other parent consultants in just a few minutes as we go through this power point. You're going to learn, what is inclusive education? Why do we have inclusive education, and with those whys, what are the values, the laws, and what does the educational practice and outcome show us, and we're going to talk about that. And, I hope you enjoyed this cartoon here. One of our board members, Colleen Tomko, draws a lot of cartoons for the parents' site, and she shares her experience. And, if you ever have time to visit and look at her work, it's all about her experiences with her son. So, it was a way of how she expressed herself, so enjoy them as well.

We're also going to be going through slides about how do you do inclusive education. What are the practices, and what did I mean about when I said you need the right accommodation and adaptations, you know, what works for your child. What does that mean? And, in the end, we're going to show you what inclusion looks like as well. And, here's just some of our goals that we've been going through tonight to help you understand what inclusion means, what are the opportunities, what's it show, and we're going to be going through many of these points tonight. And, as Kathy mentioned earlier, if you have a question, raise your hand, and then we'll also be able to answer some of the questions here.