Seminars

“You Gotta Know the Rules if You’re Gonna Play the Game”

A Special Education Parent Empowerment Seminar by

Graciela Tiscareno-Sato, Child Advocate

 

Location: El Manantial Restaurant, 24261 Mission Blvd, Hayward, across the street from the Hayward Plunge pool complex. Free parking in the back (enter along north wall of restaurant) or across the street at The Plunge lot.

 

When: Dinner at 5:30 followed by 2 hour seminar; ends at 8:30 p.m. Next seminar will be scheduled for early August 2010, to be prepared for the new school year.

 

Why? It’s been my experience that once parents have this framework of knowledge about Special Ed law and school culture, they become better, more informed advocates for their child’s needs. Additionally, it’s easier for me as a child advocate to work with families that already have this basic information. Without it, there will be too much time spent educating parents individually on the basics of the law and not enough time spent on getting the goals and services into child’s IEPs so that my presence can actually make a difference.

 

Agenda and other information

We’ll eat first, enjoying tasty, authentic Mexican food prepared by Jesus and Marta and chat informally for the first 45 minutes. The November and January seminar attendees really enjoyed this part of the event, a chance to have adult-only conversation over dinner! Cost of dinner and drink is about $9, plus tip.

 

Then I’ll get into the knowledge transfer with the presentation and handouts.

 

Cost is $20 per family to cover all materials. Seminar will cover:

□       Special Education law basics (I’m a graduate of the Wrightslaw Special Education Law Boot Camp)

□       Organizational culture realities of school districts and how to partner with educators

□       What you need in your special education library at home

□       How to keep the knowledge coming

 

Most importantly and uniquely: I will give you hard copy handouts of the tools and items we created that we use to run our IEP meetings.  This approach keeps meetings child-centric and not staff/budget/resource/excuse-centric. It works…..really!

 

I want to limit the group to the first 20 people that R.S.V.P via email to me at grace@liberate-us.org. I want to be sure there's enough time for questions at the end and throughout.