> Kathy Miller: Good evening. Welcome to Competence and Confidence, Partners and Policymaking Family Leadership for Inclusive Education in Non-Traditional Settings. Tonight's webinar, Community Connections Enrich, Engage and Included, Tanya Regli, who is the Executive Director of the Arc of Philadelphia, and our very own Cathy Roccia-Meier, who is the Family Education Coordinator here at the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University. Let me tell you a little bit about C2P2, Family Leadership. As I mentioned before, Competence and Confidence, Partners and Policymaking, which we shortened to C2P2 Family Leadership is brought to you tonight by the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University. Funding for this process comes from the Pennsylvania Developmental Disabilities Council. C2P2 family leadership and inclusive education for non-traditional schools is designed for families of students with disabilities, who are educated in homeschools, cyber charter schools, charter schools, private schools or parochial schools. The goal of this project 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 a non-traditional school community. Our project activities include online leadership development training, such as this evening, free one-on-one parent consultation support from trained parent consultants. We have online resources, and there will be a live session in spring of 2015. Tonight's webinar, Community Connections Enrich, Engage, and Included, as I mentioned, is being brought to you by Tanya Regli, who is our Executive Director, the Executive Director of the Arc of Philadelphia, and Cathy Roccia-Meier, our very own Family Education Coordinator at the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University. Sabra Townsend will also be making a guest appearance, she's a family member who will be sharing her story this evening, as well, so you really have a wonderful opportunity. I wanted to tell you a little bit about some of the archived webinars that are available on our website. Teamwork for Success, the Parent-Professional Relationship had guest presenters, Linda Carmona-Bell and Diana Neri of the Pennsylvania Education for All Coalition, which is known as PEAC. It's a wonderful session, all about how to work with your child's team for having good success and having your child really excel at learning and having a, you know, creating a wonderful relationship with the professionals on your child's team. Another webinar that we have, Your Child's Rights, Learn the Laws and Rules to Support your Child's Education, with our guest lecturer, Maura McInerney, who is an Attorney and actually is a Senior Staff Attorney with the Education Law Center. You'll see right below on your screen the live link that you can click to get right to our website so you can access two of those webinars. Other webinars that we have that are also on that same website are Supporting All Abilities of Students Learning Together, Diane Perry and Karen Salomon and Natalie Wieters of the Pennsylvania Education for All Coalitions, PEAC, were our main speakers for that session, and our other session that is available on our website is Creating a Vision for your Child's Future with guest speaker, Tim Gruesel, who is the Director of Quality Enhancement Support Team in Sinking Springs, Pennsylvania. Future webinars, very important, until November 15th we have opened a link where you can go on and the survey, you'll see the reference right below, and you can vote for what kind of topic you would like to have us present on with this project. Some of the potential topics you'll see right on the screen in front of you right now, safety, what accommodations are, you may want to learn about specially designed instruction and self-advocacy, understanding evaluations and regulations, any of those topics, plus another one. Many of you may be looking at this archived session after the survey monkey [Assumed Spelling] is closed. You can always contact Cathy Roccia-Meier, whose information will be posted at the end of this session, to express your opinion as to what kind of webinar you would like us to present in this program. So a live session will be held on November 8th at the Pennsylvania Education for All Coalition, the Annual Inclusion Conference, We're All Better Together. You can look at that archived event at the Pennsylvania's Education for All website, which is listed below. And we would love for you to pencil in these dates in your calendar because our next webinar from C2P2 Families as Leaders will be on Wednesday, February 18th, 2015, as well as Wednesday, March 18th in the next year. We will be doing, as I mentioned before, a spring C2P2 Family as Leaders live event. It's going to be occurring sometime in May. We will keep you posted as to when that will happen, and we want to let you know that once you sign-up for one of our webinars that we do, we will have your address and we can send that information, but it'd be great if you could just jot those February and March dates down. I also want to highlight that one of the wonderful services that the Council funds allows us to do with this project is providing to families a one-on-one parent consultation. This is free of charge, there's no cost to you, and these are trained parent coordinators, who work for Pennsylvania's Education for All Coalition. And, again, this free service is available to any family who is participating in C2P2 Families as Leaders Training. All you need to do is request guidance and technical assistance can be offered to you. The PEAC consultants can assist you with any of the following. You may be interested in locating resources and support. You may want to have a clear understanding of your child's rights. You may want to use these folks to help you review your child's individual education plan or his or her evaluation report. These are all trained family members, who are very familiar with these areas and can be of great assistance to you. Another idea you may have is strategies to support your child's inclusive education and some suggestions and ideas that you may want for accommodations, and in some cases you may request in any case, but sometimes a consultant can go with you and attend an IEP meeting for transition, either early intervention or a secondary transition. So it's really a wonderful service that are offered, and support can be offered in person, over the phone or by e-mail as needed. So what you need to do to request a parent consultant is to go to our project website, which is listed below disabilities.temple.edu/programs/ leadership/c2p2family.shtml and complete a form, and someone will get back to you with a consultant. Another wonderful service that we offer is some online resources. On our site we have a Facebook page, online resources are actually on our website, there's a listing of resources, but we also have a closed Facebook page, and it's a closed group, which means that it is a confidential group and is only among those people who join that group so you can feel confident to express whatever it is that is, you know, ask a question or get some information from the others who are members of that group. What you need to do is just click join group on that reference, that's above. Your request should be accepted within a few days, and then you can post and read comments. For more information about C2P2 Families as Leaders you can contact Cathy Roccia-Meier, who is our Family Education Coordinator and is in charge of this program, and she will be the one who is the most knowledgeable about the program and will be able to answer your questions. If Cathy doesn't know the answer to your question she will find out. Her numbers are her voicemail, her direct line is 215-204-1772. You can reach her by TTY on 215-204-1805 or you may fax us at 215-204-6336. Cathy's e-mail address is . Without further ado, I am thrilled to introduce Tanya Regli, the Executive Director of the Arc of Philadelphia, as well as Cathy Roccia-Meier, and they will introduce themselves further. Enjoy the webinar. Thank you.
> Here you have two beautiful pictures of two of our speakers this evening, and again tonight's webinar I'm very pleased to introduce Tanya Regli, who is as I noted the Executive Director of the Arc of Philadelphia, and our very own Cathy Roccia-Meier, who is our Family Education Coordinator here at the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University. So I am going to turn the program over to them. Thank you so much. Tanya?
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> Tanya Regli: Good evening, everyone. My name is Tanya Regli, and I am thrilled to be here, talking about this topic. This has been something that really I have been working on personally and professionally for the last - for more than 20 - I'm sorry, for about 12 years now. If we look at, you see a little blurb about me and my background is in advocacy and social work and social policy. I've also been part of starting parent groups for my own school district and working very closely with parents in Philadelphia, as well. I live in Hilton Ham [Assumed Spelling], and that is another area where we've been working very hard for inclusion.
> Cathy Roccia-Meier: Good evening, this is Cathy Roccia-Meier. I am, as I said, the Family Education Coordinator at the Institute on Disabilities. I have a 17-year-old who has a disability. I've been very active, both locally and within the state, advocating for my son, as well as others. I've been the past Chairperson for our Local Right to Education Taskforce, and I'm a current member of the State Special Education Advisory Panel. I do see one question that we're waiting on, and I just wanted to add a quick answer. The question is this student is attending a Vo Tech school, he's been offered a Coop working program in his field, and the school has said that they will drive him there, but he will need to get his own transportation home. The question is as long as he's in high school with an IEP, shouldn't the school also transport him back home? The simple answer is, yes, they should, it should be listed in the IEP, and then they will have to comply to that requirement.
> Tanya Regli: So one of our first questions is why, why should your child participate in extracurricular social and recreational activities in our schools and communities? And really the focus of this presentation today is going to be answering that question, talking about the many different good reasons why having this inclusion is really important. It is not only building opportunity, it's building the future for each child. So we are going to go to the next slide, where we're going to ask you what did you want to be when you grew up? So this is the first question we often get when we're children, when we start thinking about our futures. And so we're going to do a little bit of an exercise, and this is really about oftentimes what causes us to have community engagement, is we start exploring and thinking about what we want to do. Whether it's dancing or taking art class, so what did you want to be when you grew up? You can go up to, and actually this is going to be fun, we go up to the textbox here, we go to the whiteboard, and then we go to the T, textbox, text tool, and click that, and you can actually write - here you're going to find out, and you can even choose a fun spot for yourself here. I'm going to go with green, and you can write, just choose a space somewhere on this whiteboard. Awesome, I'm getting great ones already. And then click away from it, click over to the side, and it'll enter it. So we have nurse, teacher, writer, dancer, ballet, any more? Anyone can do this if you like, except those on the phone. Artist, great, thank you - social worker, so these are all dreams we had as kids. Oh, cool, two social workers, awesome. And this component is really - a doctor, okay, put doctor here - and are really the beginnings of starting to explore what we will be and how we will be included in our community. Oftentimes we forget to ask these questions of our children when they have disabilities. So we're going to look at the next - we're going to look at a video now called, When I Grow Up, and we're going to hear a little bit from the kids, themselves, about what they wanted to be, what they want to be when they grow up, and why it's important. Give us a moment.
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^M00:21:20
Thank you for the delay there. So some very wonderful things they really said in a very fun way, by the children in this video. And some of the really main components of what we're going to be talking about this evening in terms of exploring and understanding what your dreams are and what you want to do in life. And pursuing those dreams is really about being included in all sorts of interesting activities in your own community. So why? Because it's about opportunities, starting with - whoops, I'm trying to move forward, slowly - there we go, sorry about that. So without the opportunity to dream, why do you look to include a child in a community setting and outside of school? And there is a lot of really fabulous reasons. One of the main ones being social connection. There has been all sorts of studies, and here I give you a couple links that you can look at at your leisure about how important social connection is to happiness, to health, to long-term living, to so many things that we don't even realize, social networks really give that. It's a safety thing, it's all sorts of different ways of helping us get the supports we need to live a successful and full life. And why active citizenship? This is also another reason, that being included in the community is very important. Being an active member of society and helping to make choices in our community really gives us a chance to practice some of our dreams, to build capacity, and to explore in a voluntary way all different kinds of possible jobs. So that's another reason why being included in things like volunteering at your local Y, doing service projects on Martin Luther King Day, being part of your church, those are all really important components of being an active citizen. And here we have a picture of one young man, working to - it happens to be my son - working to actively get out the message of the importance of youth to be employed in paid jobs in high school. And I can tell you that this was a recent experience we had, and it was tremendous in terms of his own confidence level. He had at times in his life struggled with the feeling that he's always being helped and that he's not helping, and here was a chance for him to be an active citizen and to do something that made him feel like he was helping others. And it's a very powerful thing to do with your child.
> Cathy Roccia-Meier: And this is Cathy speaking. Another reason why is additionally having your child participate in a variety of activities, it's beneficial to all children, not just those with differences. From social skill development, to learning how to collaborate with others, after school and in school activities are helpful to one and all. Sorry for the pause. If you look back at the video you just saw, what did you see? You saw children, both with and without disabilities, and their hopes and their dreams are no different than the type of hopes and dreams that we had as children. It's the same as the typical children that we work with all the time. So this is all about getting the children the opportunity to participate in all the activities so that all children get to experience as part of childhood and life, and that's both in school and out of school time. Also, these opportunities mean even more to our children as they age. By trying out various activities we can learn our children's hidden talents and skills, and that is so important. Being part of the community, making friends, building relationships, it's only the beginning. These experiences can help point them to future career paths, passions and hobbies. This is a picture of Jessie, who had participated in HIPO [Assumed Spelling] therapy, but is actually also a horseman now and enjoys working with horses. And this is a great time to refer back to your child's vision. If you haven't done this yet for your child I can't recommend it enough. You can see this whole webinar and this process on our site, but to briefly explain you look at your child's interests and desires and then you can build a path for your child's future, for both non-academic times, as well, because they're equally important. I think we all think when we're working with younger children with special needs we focus so much on the academic skills and the educational components and the therapy, that there's often not enough time or energy left for us to explore after school and community activities. I mean, let's face it, as parents it can be exhausting, but we need to remember the whole child and build on those strengths, so our children can be a success.