JUDITH HOLT:  The next presentation focuses on school districts.

Have you ever talked to someone from a school district and felt they were speaking a different language?

They have their own set of acronyms which is pretty impressive.

They have their own rules and regulations and what a disability is and isn't and does that student benefit from special education.

They have a fairly stringent set of rules.

Now, I want to take you back just a little bit.

Well, some of you won't go back this far, but some of you may.

19, let's see, 1975.

I know, I know.

Don't tell me.

You weren't born yet.

Okay.

Then close your ears you may not want to know this.

If you look at the disability movement, we often don't look at the movement that happened with families who had young children with disabilities.

And these were the days back in the 60's and early 70's, but if a child had a disability, they weren't allowed in the school.

A serious disability.

And so it was families who really advocated that schools, when they say a public education is available for everyone, that everyone really meant everyone, all means all.

And it was a real battle.

And I remember I was in Louisiana when 94142 was passed.

That was the public law that kind of mandated national services for, right then it was for kids age 6 to 17.

That was the core and they've expanded in both directions somewhat.

And I remember I was working for the Department of Education and special ed, and they said you've got a superintendent from one of the parishes, those are counties in Louisiana, who is really hot and wants to talk to you.

I said, okay.

And he said, so, you're telling me that if I have a child who is 8 years old and who isn't toilet trained, I have to put him in my school?

I said, yes, sir.

And then I do not want to repeat the conversation immediately thereafter, but it wasn't polite.

I didn't know a lot of Cajun cuss words and I learned.

So you have to remember that the schools, the families and the parents fought those same battles to get the kids in schools.

And that battle continues in some ways today because there is tremendous pressure to have everybody accomplish everything and schools have a lot of disincentives in terms of the special ed money they were supposed to get they never got in the amount they were supposed to have in the law.

They have been traditionally under-funded.

They evidently will make enough to recruit rehab counselors, we learned that from the last session, right, that schools can recruit the rehab counselors because they pay a bit more.

So the schools have their own language, their own laws, their own procedures, and they are very, very procedurally driven in many respects, federal requirements, federal and state monitoring, so they have their own set of things to deal with.

What's interesting though is you have a common ground.

You have the youth with disabilities who are going to be exiting the schools, usually at age 21, sometimes until age 22 and a few states go beyond that.

You have the whole issue of employment.

Schools are focused on academic achievement.

That's what they are being pushed to do, but they also want all kids to succeed.

So you have a lot in common, too.

So I'm hoping today as you listen to these folks and as you ask questions afterward that you're continuing to look at what are our commonalities, what can we do that would be good partnerships?

So I believe Kenneth is starting us off.

We now have two, I think I can say this, younger women.

Because most people are younger than I am who have volunteered to tap dance.

We may get it yet. Kenneth didn't.

KENNETH DUESING:  That's correct.

I volunteered to clap if she did actually tap dance though.

Thank you for inviting us to give a different perspective to the week here and the presentations.

We were just talking and we thought it was really a great honor to get the late afternoon after snack break time slot.

Because we know that is the best time for learning.

But given that we'll try to muddle through.

So just to give you a little insight into Manchester, we are the largest city in New Hampshire and saying that you have to remember as Lisa said, we're small but mighty.

We have 100,000 approximately for our city population.

We're the largest school district in the state with 14,000, almost 15.

There is only one other school district in the state that has more than 10,000 students.

So our districts are small.

For Manchester, we have four high schools, our population is roughly 5,000, a little shy of that.

About 18 percent of our students in the district are identified with a disability.

That number is consistent in the high school, about 17 percent.

Manchester is really unique in New Hampshire because New Hampshire is not the most diverse state.

I think someone from Minnesota earlier said their lack of diversity, we're even less diverse than Minnesota.

We're actually unique in that we do have 62 different languages spoken in our district.

22 of which are spoken by more than ten students, but we were a refugee center for a number of years.

So we have a lot northern African population, a lot of Hispanic population moving up from Massachusetts, but we have a number of languages to give you an idea and the district I worked in before Manchester I knew of two students who were English learners with a disability in the entire district.

So it's not, our district is not the norm and you'll hear from our folks a lot about how welcome to Manchester is our phrase of love our teachers and for those of us who worked in different districts, I used to work in Boston Public Schools, it's not all that different, but for New Hampshire, it is, just to let folks know that.

Our graduation rate in the district, four year graduation rate is around75 percent.

We're under the average for the state and our drop out rate is about 4.5 percent.

We're over the average for the state.

So looking at programs that help prevent drop out and increase our graduation rate is something that we are in need of.

And so our collaboration with GSIL helps that in a small way, but it's really significant.

So our connection, we learned yesterday, Peter talked about how the state Department of Education developed or approved for extended learning opportunities, our board, a school committee then created a policy for that in 2009 and that's where the genesis for this really began.

Previously, GSIL had worked with students.

We talked about how it was really an individually-based program and we've had other providers do the same thing.

We want to come in and we're going to try and target this specific child.

When we talked about our, and I was going to say what's different about this is that we moved from that individually-based program to talking about a group and really doing, moving from postvention trying to get kids back into school to prevention and helping kids stay in school and that's a really significant change that we haven't talked about so far.

The students we're working with are currently enrolled students.

They are not students who have dropped out.

They are students who may have disengaged, but they are still attending and still enrolled in the schools.

So they came to the school district and worked with you know the small individual populations as Peter and Maureen had said and then they came and said, you know, let's look at this.

And again, it was through the ARRA funding.

So there was grant funding for this and I'll say, well, let me go on to talk about our goal was how to reengage those students through the ARRA funding we as a school district were able to hire the outreach coordinators at our high school levels.

Those were the folks who went out and knocked on doors and made phone calls and said come back to school.

So this kind of changed into doing this prevention piece, and you know it moved from, again, those folks who had dropped out already to those who were at risk.

And we specifically designed it for students with disabilities.

It's not, we have other programs for kids at risk who are not identified, but nothing like this.

So we had worked, started developing these ELO's, the extended learning opportunities, and a key part of that is, it needs to be meaningful and substantial.

It needs to have depth of instruction and depth of knowledge.

We have the competencies for our English class, for our health class, the ELOs have to meet that.

So that's where our teachers come in and look at the curriculum.

Maureen talked yesterday about meeting with our assistant superintendent to make sure that the curriculum they were using matches up with the district and it meets our standards and so will address the needs of our students.

So why did we work with GSIL?

Because we've talked about this a lot, there was a relationship.

It had grown over years and it's grown since we started this.

You know, they came in with the idea for this and we developed it together through our partnership with VR, with the school district, with GSIL, so we have the curriculum piece.

We have academic instruction.

Our program, to me, sounds a little different than what other folks are doing because we really are looking at, you know, it is an academic-based program, but it also has the soft skills, the pre-employment skills that Lisa was just talking about.

She mentioned that was a win-win and it is because it meets both of our needs.

So, you know, kids are earning credits so they are working towards their diploma which is, to keep kids in school, they need to see progress.

And when you're a 16-year-old and you're still a freshman and for a second year or third year because you don't have the required credits to become a junior, that's when you're losing interest.

So earning credit is a big thing and sometimes there has been a little bit of discussion about younger kids and I know we feel sometimes kids who struggle in middle school say, oh go to high school because now, in order to pass you need to have that credit and they know that and it's kind of a more tangible piece than what you see in middle school.

And that works for some kids.

It doesn't work for all kids.

Kids who struggle in middle school are still likely to struggle in high school if we don't do something different.

So we're trying to do that through this.

So we did develop this where we set up three sessions per year, fall semester, spring semester and then an extended school year, summer session for students.

I think a key to what we've done, and I spoke about some of this, this morning is that we started small and we've stayed small even though we've seen more success as we've gone on, we've kept it small.

We have three four year high schools, one vocational school, and we've selected just five students from each school for each of those sessions.

And the reason, part of that is due to funding.

When we look at what staff they are using, we are looking at teachers, we are looking at transportation, all that costs money.

As I think most folks know, most agencies, most school districts don't have excess funds to throw around.

So we need to make sure it's cost effective and by staying small that's what we decided to do.

So when we talk about some of the vocational pieces, too, someone yesterday was thinking, talking about, I forget where this came from, but they were talking about using or the vocational pieces were kind of, some people think traditional things of working in a hotel and laundry service doing kitchen and the nice thing about this is with their contacts they've been able to reach out to different employers and meld that with students' interests.

So we've had kids who worked for the city parks and recs.

We've had kids who worked for the animal shelter or the pet store in addition to doing things like the hotel or a parking garage.

It's, they've been able to match students' interests and so that vocational piece keeps students  engaged while they are also learning in these new ways rather than the more traditional kind of academic piece that they need to do.

So part of our, when we talk about barriers, of course funding is a big barrier.

We were lucky that this started during the era when we had the ARRA grant.

So they had funding.

We had funding and that helped get it started and we were able to change to that fee-for-service as we moved along and that's when we had the sharing between VR and the district as we've talked about.

I'm going to say one of our biggest reasons for successes is because we established this advisory group.

It started off with the assistant superintendent, the assistant director, high school assistant principals, high school guidance counselors, one from each school, along with GSIL reps, VR reps.

We had monthly meetings and at these meetings we had a meeting structure and Maureen comes in every meeting with her agenda, which really helps.

And so at every meeting we start off with a review of what's been going on with the students in the program.

The first thing we talk about are the students.

We talk about their attendance, if they are coming.

We talk about parent contacts, if they're not coming and it's great because our guidance counselors who know these students well are able to share information with GSIL staff who are getting to know these students well.

We talk about what's going to happen in the next month ahead in the program.

Who is coming in?

Oh, we have folks from the health department coming in.

We have folks from wherever coming in.

We have our H. R. director.

So they are coming in and talking with students and as a school district, and I have a better sense of what's going on because I'm not there every day, we're able to problem solve.

Well, Johnny is saying this and he comes in like this.

What can you tell me about that or what can you tell me about his family so that we can connect with the student or make in roads and our guidance counselors are really helpful on that.

Because they know the students and they know the families.

So just that dialogue is probably the best thing that happens from an administrative perspective.

But that happens and then we talk about the schedule, what's coming up for future months, what's coming up for when are we, when the program ending?

When is the next session starting?

How do we do our referrals for the next session?

I think those types of things have been really helpful.

We plan months in advance for when students are going to be interviewed for the next session.

And everyone whips out their calendar and VR says I can do it these days.

We're saying no, those are finals for the semester.

So pick another week.

I know, and it's just that type of stuff that seems really mundane, but for me, I found that to be one of the most valuable pieces of our collaboration.

A big issue as we started was kind of the cycles of these sessions.

They started off with ten week sessions for this program.

Which didn't align with our semesters.

Our semesters are about 17 weeks.

So we had, if we're talking about the fall semester, September, half of
October, students are in school and they are in traditional programs.

They go to the Earn and Learn Program for ten weeks and then there were like three or four weeks at the end of the semester where they were back in school.

So it became evident really quickly about this is a problem.

This doesn't work for the students and how do we do that?

As a school, we come in and say, all right, how do we keep the kids engaged before they go to the program?

Because if they're in school for six weeks, they're not earning a credit in that classroom.

And if they know they're not earning a credit cause they are going to leave, then why should they go to class?

It turns out to be a bit of a problem.

On the opposite end, they come back and there is four weeks or three weeks left and kids are getting ready to take finals and they are reviewing in the classroom.

How do we fit a student who hasn't been in that English class for ten weeks, into an English class.

Quickly that was like a big barrier.

So I think as a recommendation, I'd say if you're working with a school district, find out what their needs are as their calendar for their students, see how it works.

Do you do something for a quarter, do you do something for a trimester however they, if we're looking at a credit-based program, how do kids in their school districts earn credits?

What are the requirements?

Because that's going to be a big impact on how you set up your program I think.

We have a problem with overlap between a current session running, planning for the next session.

Our biggest latest issue was this spring.

We had a program ending, so we had to make referrals for our summer program, but then we also had to make referrals for our fall program.

And so we started off, there was this discussion I remember clearly about, okay, we're going to this date for summer referrals and interviews and this date for fall referrals.

And my school district people, my guidance counselors are like, no way will that work.

First, for us to keep it straight, it's just kind of confusing.

We can wait until fall.

That's okay.

Where other people were, like VR is like no we need to do it early and GSIL is like we need do it early but not that early.

So it's kind of coming together.

Those are kind of the pitfalls and I think, it was all solved in our advisory meeting and that was solved in one meeting.

So it worked really well.

People just kind of getting there, I think we all come with our perspectives about what's important for us and we sometimes lose focus about it's about the kids and what's important for all and that if I work together with VR, then that's going to help the student in the future.

Even though my primary piece is looking at now and moving the student towards a diploma.

So another piece for us was making appropriate referrals.

When we started this program, our school folks you know had a long list of kids who needed help.

They're not engaged.

We need to do something.

So it's trying to figure out how does this program work for this student?

Is this student appropriate versus that student?

Yesterday there were questions about kind of how do you pick and choose.

And I think over time that's become less of a problem for us because our school staff really know, or have a better understanding of what the Earn and Learn Program is and what student it works for.

So when we make referrals and because there is only five, our staff at this point is saying, no, you know, this kid is kind of on the cusp and we're trying different things.

So we're going to keep him in reserve for the spring semester because we think we're going to be okay with him.

If not, then he's going to be a good candidate for the spring.

Where this child is more needy, and we really think the computer-based programming or vocational piece is going to be excellent for her.

So we're going to move forward with her right now and really what our folks are doing is they might identify seven kids and that's it.

And really two of those are kind of in reserve in case something happens with one.

But they aren't successful in the program, don't show up after two days, if they're just as we do the interviews they can't make the commitment, so it's not, I think because we've had consistency in those advisory meetings and because we've just developed those relationships, we've been able to avoid some those pitfalls that seem to be bigger earlier on and luckily when I say bigger, they weren't huge.

That were like stoppers for us.

I think we've been blessed in that piece.

So we look at the age, we look at the number of credits earned and look at VR mentioned this this morning and Lisa did, too, VR looks at referrals two years prior to graduation.

So sometimes we're trying to figure out what that means for our students.

Here is a student who is probably not two years from graduation, but we think this would be good to help them get on track.

Get them on the path to graduation even though it's not going to be in two years.

So it's just finding a balance between that really.

For our extended learning opportunities, it's all about earning those credits and giving other ways to do that.

So we have online computer-based learning.

We use A Plus software.

There is Plato, and I mention this morning, that is Plato the philosopher, not the children's toy.

Although that might be highly motivating for some kids, too.

And so it's a move at your own pace.

So you have to have a certain kind of student who is able to do that.

There are some students who that's not going to be successful for so this might not be the best program to use for that piece of it.

Some kids are really motivated because they are on computers all the time and I can get on one and it says I got this right so I can go to the next level.

It's like a game.

We have, in New Hampshire either certified or what we call highly qualified teachers.

If you don't have the certification in social studies, you could be a highly qualified teacher in which case you're still able to teach that subject matter and those are staff we have from the district who come in and evaluate the work through the extended learning opportunities that were completed by the student.

So they'll come in and meet with the student, meet with Maureen and her staff and review the work that was done and say this does pass muster or this doesn't.

We need to do more for that.

So my big take aways from this are creating an advisory group.

Administratively, that is a great thing to do.

Get people there who are going to be able to problem solve and work together.

Monthly meetings, you know, I know, I've been on other meetings where we have quarterly meetings, semester meetings, monthly meetings have been really helpful for this because we're able to solve these small problems as they come up and it doesn't become a big problem and we're able to work through things.

Being clear about requirements for each partner.

We talked about this, as funding agencies, I have my requirements, VR has their requirements, GSIL has their requirements, we need to meld those together.

Lisa talked about it being win-win and I think that's the attitude you have to go into it.

What is in it for me but how does that support my other partners in this, too.

If you're coming to a school district to talk to them, they were just talking about this during the VR presentation.

Hopefully you can come in with data, but I'll say this when we met, we didn't have data because there wasn't a program like this.

So part of it we worked with a consultant who always talks about the cardiac assessment.

If it feels like the student is making progress.

I feel it in my heart and there is a certain amount where you can do that, but that only goes so far and so I think we talk about data a lot and in education these days, that is what it's all about.

You have to have evidence that what you're doing works.

Especially if you're going to ask the district to go to their school board to fund this, you better come with some ideas about how you're going the measure the student's progress.

Right now we can measure students progress because we see them earning credits.

We see them heading towards graduation.

We see them getting employed post-secondary.

And sometimes I recognize you don't have that coming in.

And we didn't necessarily have that coming in either, but there was plan together and we figured out what data we were going to collect and how we were going to meet that together.

As everyone else has said, that's me.

Feel free to contact me and I know we'll do questions afterwards.

Thank you.

AMY NOONE:  Hello.

I'm Amy Noone with Commonwealth Connections Academy.

SUSAN PESAVENTO:  I'm Susan Pesavento, also from Commonwealth Connections Academy.

AMY NOONE: I guess we are going to start with a little bit of an overview of our school.

I'd like to start out by saying how many of you are familiar with cyber schools and how they work?

Okay, so we see a few people familiar with it.

The way our school works is we're an accredited public school.

We were established in 2003 and we do have a parent company out of Baltimore, Maryland called Connections Education and with Connections Education, we now have 27 states that have schools.

And many of you that are here represent some of the states in which we have schools.

Pennsylvania was one of the first schools though that they established and we are a free K through 12 school.

So our parents do not pay tuition.

Our money comes from the individual districts that our students are being pooled from.

And parents decide they want us as an alternative because we can provide teachers that are all certified and students have the flexibility to learn at their own pace.

They are given a schedule that we like them to try to adhere by, but they can move at a faster pace or they can slow things down to move at their own pace.

And we currently have obviously 67 counties within the state of PA and we have seven offices and we also have two drop-in centers.

Those drop-in centers are used for students that need extra attention because they're not getting it at home because perhaps the learning coach isn't there to oversee their education drew out the day because it's a parent who works full time.

Currently at the end of our school year, we had an enrollment of 8,350 students.

We're projected this year for 9,000 or more.

Our special education enrollment is also about 18 percent of our total enrollment and at the end of the year we had 1535 kids.

And out of that 1535, almost 900 of them were of transition age.

And we have two people to serve those 900 kids.

So if you try to call us, you might not get us, but we'll get back to you.

So, yes, Joe can attest to that.

We are definitely seeing an increase in our population of special needs, especially in the areas of intellectual disability, autism and emotional disturbance.

They are our highest growth rate of students.

SUSAN PESAVENTO:  So before I get to how we started to establish our relationship with the Lehigh Valley CIL, I should probably explain a little background about our transition department in general.

So in 2010 transition really, I don't want to say didn't exist, but it was kind of an after-thought.

The teachers at the end said, oh, by the way, what do you want to do when you graduate?

And then they jotted something down and that was it.

That was transition.

And so our director obviously identified that we needed some more transition activities going on.

So she created the position I now currently hold, transition coordinator.

So I came on in 2010 and immediately our school underwent indicator 13 training.

And it was a year-long process for us.

It was fantastic.

It was a great learning experience.

So that was 2010-2011.

So when the next school year came around, our school was up for our six year cyclical monitoring.

So Pennsylvania Department of Ed came in to audit our special education program.

One of the findings from that audit was that we did not have community partners.

We didn't have any agencies in our IEP meetings.

They weren't spoken about or talked about.

So that was my focus for the next school year.

That was my take away, community partnerships.

So then in 2012-2013 I grew my department, my department grew, they gave me Amy, which doesn't sound like a huge growth, but it was big for us because now I had somebody else to bounce ideas off of, to do research, to make those cold calls and do those E-mails.

And so we started establishing our community partnerships.

And that leads to how we became associated with the Lehigh Valley CIL.

We heard about them, I heard about them first at the transition conference that we attend every summer at Pennsylvania State University.

I had seen them present.

I had seen the students running around with their T-shirts on and the S2L logo.

So it got me thinking, but then more importantly we had families coming to us saying, from that area, our students have been doing the S2L program.

Can you help us pay for that?

Can you guys take that on?

Why aren't you associated with them?

Why don't know about them and just really pushing it.

And so we started to do our research and we reached out to them.

We called and said, hey, what do you guys think about maybe working with us?

And basically it was opening those lines of communication.

We had a need and they could fill that need for us.

So that's how it all got started.

AMY NOONE:  the next question that we were asked was what expectations did the school have about the CIL?

And I think that some of our concerns about it was how would they feel about working with a cyber school because there are 15 cyber schools in the state of Pennsylvania, but as most of you saw when hands were raised here just in this room, there is not a lot of people that know how cyber schools work, what the student population looks like, how the students actually receive their education.

So we were concerned about that, but we knew we needed them because being a cyber setting, we can't provide independent living skills to students.

We can't show them how to do a load of laundry or how to microwave a meal because they're logging into a life lesson room where they just see a teacher.

We also knew that a lot of these students were struggling with social skills and not just because of their diagnosis, but just because of their day to day activity in their own world that they live in, not getting out in the community enough, being sheltered by family members at times.

The other big thing is travel training.

There was public transportation that students could learn how to use and to use so that would open up doors for them to get out of the house and not only for a social setting, but also for employment.

We are like everyone else, we have those counties where there is zero transportation and a lot of our agencies, including the CILs, struggle with that.

I would say that some of the surprises that we found were that we were so excited how open the CIL was with collaborating with us and talking about ideas and how they could best serve our students.

We were surprised that they could work with the students on executive functioning skills.

We loved the person centered planning as we learned about that, they are very unique.

Our other agencies we work with, they certainly do an intake meeting, but it's not nearly as involved as the CIL.

And we do appreciate that because they provide us case notes that we upload to each student's file and we do monthly meetings regarding that as well.

And we were also surprised at how many different programs that they offered and the services that they could give us.

SUSAN PESAVENTO:  the other thing that really surprised us, I think, is their adaptability, their flexibility.

It didn't matter what we came to them with, they figured out a way to do it.

And one example that I can think of off the top of my head, we had a student who, she needed help washing her hair.

She needed help just with the daily hygiene skills and things like that, but she lived an hour or maybe a little more from the center.

And so when we first referred her, obviously transportation was going to be an issue.

The family said they could probably do it, but not as often as she would require.

They were great.

It started off that the family would drive to the center one time and then they would send somebody to the house the next time.

And then trying to adapt it and make it work even better for the family so it's not such a burden, they discovered a facility at a halfway point.

I think it was like a career link or something, and now the family didn't have as long or as burdensome a drive and they were able to meet more often.

Therefore she is getting more support.

She's making more progress in a quicker way.

So just again thinking out of the box.

Adapting to each student's needs.

They've been phenomenal.

AMY NOONE:  I would say that what led us to purchase services from the CIL rather than other providers is that it was a one stop shop for us.

Many of the agencies that we work with, they only cover the vocational component of indicator 13, and as you can imagine with us, like I said before, we have a difficult time meeting the needs of independent living skills, postsecondary, even if students are wanting to look at colleges, things like that.

We've had situations with the CIL and other agencies that are willing to go out and do that, but it definitely was a one stop shop for us and we often say that we wish we could clone Lehigh Valley and put them in every county.

We're hoping that as time goes on they going to continue to work with the other CILs in Pennsylvania and get them on board with us because we often hear everybody talk about building these relationships and how do you establish the relationships.

We can tell you that on our part as well, when Seth and I were first communicating, sometimes it would go weeks at a time because I was so busy with other things that I couldn't respond to an E-mail that he had questions about regarding what were we looking for.

JUDITH HOLT:  Can I interrupt for a second.

Can you clarify what indicator 13 is for the audience?

AMY NOONE:  Certainly, indicator 13 is part of the IEP that every student has.

It's a federal program that it covers three areas and it is the employment, postsecondary goals and independent living.

So on every student's IEP that's 14 and older, we need to make sure all three of those components are being addressed for each student.

Does that clarify? Do you want to elaborate?

SUSAN PESAVENTO: Pennsylvania has a state performance plan that includes 20 indicators, five of which deal with transition.

Indicator 13 being the biggest one which, you know, encompasses all that Amy just explained.

All the schools have to go through the training and we all have to make sure.

Really the training first focused on compliance, getting your IEPs in order, making sure you're addressing all the issues in the right way with the right language and that kind of thing, but again there are so many pieces to it and getting the community partnerships and making sure that each student has a plan at age 14 and that it's not just the plan on paper, that what you've written down you're actually following through on with the students so that  they have those outcomes.

Key discussion points, so when we started our discussions with the CIL, we obviously started by saying these are our needs.

So that was obviously a big discussion.

And they were great.

We could do that.

Let's just figure out how.

So then Amy mentioned earlier that we have a parent company and they have a legal department and so we have certain things that we have to have in place before we can let outside agencies work with our students.

They have a contract that agencies and subcontractors must sign.

Now, the contract I think sometimes scares agencies, but it's nothing, I mean if you guys look at a contract or if you're asked to look at a contract and there is things in there you don't like, obviously just ask for changes.

That's what happens if the language needs to be changed or if something else needs to be adapted whatever, they do that.

They'll work with you guys.

So never be afraid I don't think of asking things to be changed or signing contracts.

So we have a big overall contract and then part of that was also discussions with Pennsylvania and CCA and CE our parent company.

We require that anybody who works with our students has to have three Pennsylvania clearances.

So that's the child abuse, the criminal background and the fingerprinting.

So that was huge for us, a big key discussion point because the agency either has to have them already, they have to be current within a year or they have to be willing to get them and if they aren't, then we can't let them work with our students.

So that's a big discussion point for us as well.

Some other discussion points that we had, who is going to handle what since we do have a management company.

Like I mentioned, they would handle all the legalities of getting the contract in place.

They also handle all the invoices.

So any billing and invoices would go to them, not to CCA.

What CCA would handle is the individual student contracts or plans.

They would send those to me for approval.

We would handle the hours that the students are allotted and the additional hours that are needed.

We handle any of the other paperwork, the IEP input, scheduling meetings, making sure the agencies are invited, things like that.

So just making sure they understood they were going to be communicating with two different entities sometimes.

Transportation of students, we keep going back to that.

That's always a big discussion point.

When we first talked our families about working with agencies, we do tell them that the transportation is, that's their responsibility.

Obviously there is times when it's just not going the happen.

The students don't have the support at home or the parents are working or whatever it is.

And so we had to discuss how is that going to look?

Does the staff go out to the house or will they transport students in those emergency cases?

And so another big key discussion point that we had to have up front.

And then how is progress going to be monitored?

How is it going to be reported back to us?

How often is it going to be reported back to us?

Other, those are big points to talk about.

How did we iron all that out and how did we come to an agreement was a lot of communication.

We just really kept the lines of communication open.

I was never afraid to pick up the phone and say, look, now I have this question and, or E-mail them quick and say this came up.

How can we do this and just keep that communication going.

And ultimately what I think led to us becoming such successful partners was that underlying understanding that it's all about the students.

And so we're going to do whatever we can to make it work for them.

So those are some of the points that we talked about.

So if we can make recommendations for other CILs, what should you be willing to provide to school districts when you're talking about this?

Definitely like a menu I guess or whatever, of a list of services that you offer.

How you're going to be providing them.

Credentials for your staff, again, if they do need any clearances or certain education requirements, be ready to provide that.

Definitely where you serve, I mean for Pennsylvania, like I said we cover all 67 counties so we always have to say what counties do you cover because our student are so spread out.

I don't want to refer a student that's not in their footprint.

We have to know exactly where you guys work.

Ages, too.

We find that sometimes different agencies or CILs, they don't want to work with the students until they are much older and we like to get them out there at 14 and 15.

At least beginning the independent living skills or the volunteering or something.

It was great, too, when we first started talking, the Lehigh Valley CIL had a lot of literature on their history, how they began, when their programs were implemented, how they grew, what they looked like now, testimonials from families and things like that that they readily provided to us which I thought was very, very helpful.

And then if you have other successful or current relationships with any other school districts that you might want to mention that and say, hey, you can contact them if you need to for a referral.

This is me again?

Facts and details, obviously you have to talk money and fees.

So that was a big thing for us.

You know, each, what each service is going to cost.

Is it going to be hourly?

Is it just here is a big chunk of time and this is what it's going to cost and this is what we're going to do or could it be broken down.

What is it going to look like?

Who your point of contact is going to be.

We've been very fortunate that, again, we have constant communication with Joe and Seth, but we also have access to the staff that's working with our students on a daily basis.

And I feel very comfortable giving them a phone call as well to say, hey, how did it go today?

Or I just got your report, can you explain this a little more or whatever it is I need to know.

So just that level of comfort that we have.

Progress reports, again, they were very flexible about we had kind of a template for what we were looking for, the information we wanted back.

They had their own forms.

They said whatever you want, we'll do it.

And there are progress reports, monthly case notes that they give to us, very, very detailed, very extensive, very thorough.

Again, and I'm not knocking any other agency that we work with, but it pales in comparison to what they are able to provide.

And you can just tell it's very evident that they really know the young adults that they work with.

So just trying to, again, discuss what that's going the look like, how often they are going to be provided, the actual forms.

Just that minutiae you have to iron out those are some of the details that we had to look at.

AMY NOONE:  So when it's time for to us refer a student, what we typically do is we have a referral form and Susan and I usually never meet the students.

We may have had a conversation with them on the phone or we may have talked with a parent, and sometimes the parent is helpful at giving us an idea of some of the things that they would like their student to work on, sometimes it is not.

So we will read over the IEP and we read over their psych Ed evals and that's how we formulate kind of a suggestion to give to the CIL to start working with the student.

However, teachers too, we do, they do, the learning support teachers definitely give us a lot of information.

But what we then do is, we forward that information over to the CIL and we rely on them to give us feedback as well because they have the student there in person and they're meeting with them and once again that's where that open line of communication comes into play because we rely on them to give us feedback on other areas that we may have missed by reading up on this student or talking with the teachers.

So one of our students, CZ, he's 18 years old.

He has a specific learning disability, also a speech and language impairment.

He was participating in a social skills group and he did that in place of his occupational therapy.

He started with the CIL in 2013 and he did that by participating in their
S2L program and then he did the six week summer program.

And along the way, they find out different things about him and areas that he'd like to work in by doing assessments, some of our assessments are done through choices.

I think I heard somebody else refer to it as bridges.

We call it choices with our students.

And they'll work on that while they are at the CIL and it's having them match their interests with their abilities and that helps also guide the CIL then with setting up CWA's for them, which is a community-based work assessment.

I am sure everybody knows that acronym by now.

This particular student does not like to communicate.

He does not like having to interact with other people.

So he was doing different CBWA's and basically production.

He worked at a cigar shop where he bagged and taped cigars and he loved it.

It worked out well for him.

He also did a CBWA at T. J. Maxx and he has continued to go back there and hope that they will eventually hire him on, but as far as his long term goals, some of the other things he's looking at and things that have happened since he's been at the CIL, he's finally obtained his driver's license.

Which he's incredibly proud of and we're proud of him for that.

And he now has his own car to get around.

So since he started driving, he's also started thinking about his CDL license.

He's still looking at delivery options for a company and perhaps even pest control.

So we always enjoy watching because each month we receive their case notes.

We kind of follow along and see how he's progressing through the system and we know that ultimately he will have success with finding employment.

SUSAN PESAVENTO:  So our other success story, KJ, she's an interesting young woman.

19 years old.

She basically she graduated but not technically.

She walked with her class just this past spring, but she's going to be staying on with us one more semester to do transition only because her IEP team felt she wasn't ready yet.

She didn't have the skills.

So the Lehigh Valley CIL is going to predominantly be her curriculum next year.

She's going to be working lots of hours with them.

How would you describe Kristen?

She is stubborn sometimes.

And she's an interesting case, too, because before we were able to get our contract in place with the Lehigh Valley CIL, she needed support.

She needed something, so we began having her work with a different agency and that case worker and her just did not get along at first.

It was a rough road.

Thank goodness that case worker kind of stuck with it and she's interesting because she is one of our first students that we have in our agency collaboration.

She's continuing to work with that agency.

She works with Lehigh Valley CIL predominantly and she's also involved with OVR.

So it's really neat because at one point last year everybody came to the table and talked about Kristen and what her future was going to look like and we literally put it up on sticky notes and white boards that who is responsible for what, when it's going to happen and what it was going to look like and it was really great to have that experience where everybody was together at the same table and working for this one student.

So she made a lot of strides.

She really has.

She is successfully volunteering at Salvation Army.

I am looking at Joe because –

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  He wants a mic.

SUSAN PESAVENTO:  They work so closely with the students and have so much more interaction with them that he can add.

JOE MICHENER:  I think stubborn was a good choice of words.

KJ just often resists trying anything.

Like immediate shut down when something is suggested, but she's made so much growth in that area.

One of the things we worked on her, with her a lot on was cooking a meal.

And I remember Carly, our staff person who worked primarily with her telling me lots of stories about how it never got off the ground in those initial meetings to work on it.

Now, KJ is to the point where she will cook a meal and even have some things go horribly wrong and still be willing to try it again the next time, which is, I mean it's just huge for her.

And I've known KJ for a long time and that's big progress for her.

So I think just having that support, having the right staff person working with her and finding that balance between pushing her and backing off when necessary has really been effective for her.

SUSAN PESAVENTO:  and she was also, her parents were another one of the families who were constantly saying to us, you know, she did the S2L program, she loved it.

It's good for her.
Did you know about it?

Why aren't other student doing it? 
Can you help us with this?

The driving force behind us reaching out to the CIL.

That's it.

JOE MICHENER:  May I just add something real quick.

I know Susan and Amy just discussed that they reached out to us, I know we've talked a lot about relationships throughout the course of this entire conference and how important they are and a lot of you have been looking for concrete examples of how these happened.

And you know, I hope you don't go home from the conference and sit by your phone and wait for Commonwealth to call you.

It's probably not going to happen, but I wanted to mention after this morning's sessions and I had a great conversation with Cindy from Kansas outside and it kind of sparked something that I thought about for relationships that we didn't previously mention that maybe that's just a conference like this we have so much we want to share with you that we forget these things.

I know I mentioned earlier that I don't get along with Seth.

It's not necessarily true.

Seth when he first got to the CIL and I'm just going the talk about how awesome he is because he has a real gift for this.

He put together this great little presentation, it's called have you thought about life?

It was indicated in one of our slides on the first day of the training.

And he went out, we've been talking a lot about talking to the district administrators and managers and superintendents.

Seth went out and talked to the front line people in the school districts.

He went to conferences and meetings and everything he could go to and he would just like corner teachers and say, hey, you know, I'm Seth I'm from the CIL.

I have this great presentation.

It's talking to students about life after high school and trying to hook them up with resources and he went in and
got a teacher to buy into it and got it to that classroom and had this presentation, have you thought about life.

The teacher loved it.

The teacher talked to another teacher who then called Seth and invited him in do it and it grew and grew and
grew and we got to the point where a school district called us several years down the road.

So it's not just going to the higher ups.

It's talking to the front line folks in the school district and getting your foot in the door anyway you can.

And I thought that was a much more concrete example that we were looking for earlier.

JUDITH HOLT:  Okay, we have a few minutes now if you have questions for the presenters?

Question over here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  This might be an obvious answer.

Hopefully an easy answered question but I'll give you background on it.

In Memphis over the past year and a half, we have went from having two large school districts within our county of primarily urban one and a primarily Suburban one.

Last August of 2013 it all merged into one school district and now August of 2014 we have seven school districts.

They all broke apart again.

So we have six new school districts that started this August and so if we're looking to get into the school systems, we have more history with the, it's called Shelby County School District.

They know us for the good or the bad.

They know us.

The six new school districts might know of us, maybe on their staff, but not their administration side.

So would this be a good opportunity since we have so many new school districts serving students with disabilities to approach them first or the one we have the history with?

KENNETH DUESING:  I would say go where you know the people.

That's going to be your best fastest chance to get in.

If someone approaches me and says we want to give services, I always ask for other references of school districts they've worked at.

So that I can call my counterpart over at that school district and say tell me about agency X.

We always want to hear what you've done with other school districts.

So that would be my advice is to go where they know you because they're going to probably get in there faster and then establish yourself.

AMY NOONE:  My advice would be to figure out who the director of special education is at each one of those schools or if they had a transition coordinator, because that would be your first point of contact I would think where you're going to have the most success.

Do you have anything to add to that Susan?

SUSAN PESAVENTO:  I don't think so.

AMY NOONE:  I know we didn't necessarily look for references when it came to the CIL.

We made our own opinion based on things we heard in the community from parents, not that references aren't good because they certainly are, but with you saying that you only have the one school that you've dealt with, it might be harder for you to provide those, but if you can at least get your foot in the door to talk to the director of special ed, that might be a way to go.

JUDITH HOLT:  You have another opportunity, too, it’s a little bit tricky, but since you have new folks, new folks are usually hustling to put programs together and try and figure out who is going to do what, and finding a partner who is willing to talk with them and maybe help them with some things might be an opportunity also.

JUDITH HOLT:  At any rate, just go forth and get all seven of them engaged.

Another question?

You think if you don't ask questions you'll get out early?

Wrong.

Over here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I'm probably missing something really obvious, but this question is for Kenneth.

I noticed your four year graduation rate and your four year drop-out rate add up to about 79 percent.

What happened to the other 21 percent of the students?

KENNETH DUESING:  They're not analogous to each other.

They are derived with different formulas.

A four year graduation rate is students who graduate in the four years from their freshman to senior.

So if you graduate in six years you're not part of that four year graduation rate, but you're not a drop out.

JUDITH HOLT:  That's when you ask a technical question, you'll get a technical answer.

They don't count them the same way.

That's what it amounts to in English.

Over here--oh, no.

I knew David, you realize how long it's been since Dave said anything?

DAVE HANCOX:  I know.

JUDITH HOLT:  So it's time.

DAVE HANCOX:  I am almost about to burst.

No, my question is short and simple.

Can you talk for just a couple of minutes about the impact, real or perceived, on the cyber schooling and its impact on the inclusion factor for kids with disabilities?

AMY NOONE:  I would say that the impact, it's definitely when you look at a classroom filled with students and they are at varying levels of academics and then you also add in to that behavioral issues that teachers are dealing with, we're not dealing with that in the cyber setting because even though the students attend a live lesson, they are not seen.

They have an option to raise their hand or they can type into a chat pod.

So a lot of distractions are cut down because of that.

Then we also have like modifications and accommodations that the students can click on to get help with their lessons.

They can also watch the recorded lesson time and time again.

So if they didn't pick up what the point of the lesson was that the teacher was providing, they can always go back and rewatch it, but then they also have learning support teachers that check in with them on a weekly basis and will help them with any projects that they're working on.

If they have, am I getting you?

I understood the question?

DAVE HANCOX:  Maybe I didn't ask it right.

Because I understand the resources that are available for cyber schooling.

My concern is that does this, are there other elements as part of your program that compensate for the loss of interaction?

Because when they are being cyber schooled they are losing that opportunity to interact with a larger population of disabled and non-disabled students that would be in that community, that school community.

AMY NOONE:  Well, one of the ways we do that is we have a bus.

It's called Jack, it is a mobile classroom that goes around and we have field trips in every community.

How many did we have last year?

700?

I think there was 700 field trips that the students could participate in throughout the state of Pennsylvania.

So that's one way.

We also provide clubs and activities for the students to participate in.

Some of those clubs and activities are held within their community.

Some of them are held online.

Some of them may go to one of our physical locations to participate.
That's another way that they do it.

SUSAN PESAVENTO:  and too when the students are in their live lessons, that is our live classroom, our virtual classroom, they are in there with nondisabled peers as well.

So I know it's not the physical interaction, but they are chatting with them.

They are learning right with them.

AMY NOONE:  and they are assigned as teams to work on projects and then they have blogs where they communicate with each other or through Skype.

Some of the students have web cams and they communicate through Skype through projects that they are working on as teams just like they would be assigned in regular classrooms.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  We've been talking about doing some of the cyber stuff at our CIL, but my concern is you're still not learning maybe some of the soft skills you need for employment.

So if you walk in to get employed somewhere where you have to work with a team of people and be around them.

If you're just in a cyber school, how does that work?

AMY NOONE:  One of the ways it works is that, I'll take my son as an example.

He attends CCA.

He still is involved in the community.

He participates in recreational sports.

He doesn't play on an actual brick and mortar team, but he plays for their rec league.

So he still gets the soft skill interactions because he's part of team sports.

Many of our students participate in some type of religious education or they're involved in a church where they have a youth group that they are attending and participating in.

SUSAN PESAVENTO:  Are you asking how does the cyber school provide soft skills?

We do have our learning support teachers hold monthly transition live lessons.

So at this point it is only special education students, but they go into a live lesson classroom and they work on, these are primarily students with web cams.

And they will work on some of those skills about taking turns when you're speaking.

Tone, the tone of their voice, things like that, anything that can be done again we do rely on some of our outside agencies to work on them as well.

With the students in group settings and things.

We also offer I think the social skills groups.

So we have, we contract with different agencies in communities where kids meet in groups and work on social skills if that's what's needed.

So there are opportunities to work on soft skills.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I just wanted to add that the participants in our LIFE program take part in the social clubs at the CIL as well.

The Community Club and the Career Path Club and in often cases LIFE participants are going through Career Path services and attending our group skills training and doing a variety of things like that to kind of supplement what the school is doing.

JUDITH HOLT:  a question in the back.

Is that Los Angeles?

That’s Los Angeles.

Okay.

I'm sorry, I do geographic places better than names.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I'm getting a reputation.

I'm just wondering with the schools if you ever have students that you want to refer to the program that voc rehab does not necessarily agree with that referral, is it 100 percent of the time that you are co-funding them in the program or do sometimes the schools refer people and pay 100 percent and sometimes voc rehab refers or how does that work?

KENNETH DUESING:  for us, our program is VR funds a third and the school districts funds two-thirds.

So out of those 15 students, five or six are funded by VR, which means they need to meet their criteria.

The other ones might meet their criteria, they might not and so that's kind of how we divided it up with our funding and selection of student.

That doesn't mean that VR doesn't necessarily work with them and they might work with more than those six students, but we're not tied to saying that it has to be, you have to be VR eligible in that sense.

SUSAN PESAVENTO:  CCA completely funds what our students do with the CIL.

JUDITH HOLT:  Other questions?

Okay, Alabama.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Maybe I missed this, but does the child and their parents have a choice in whether they do a physical public school or a cyber school?

SUSAN PESAVENTO:  Absolutely, we are a school of choice.

So if they for whatever reason are unhappy with their local school district, we're an option for them.

They can choose to come to us.

But they're more than welcome to go to their local school building as well.

They just can't do both at the same time.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  the partnership with the CILs, has there been any problem with 704 reporting, anything like that?

I remember that Bob Michaels was going to do a cyber center one time and he was going to do a remote program and they wouldn't let him do it because of 704 reporting issues.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Bob Michaels is down in Tempe, Arizona and I work for ABIL in Phoenix, and I oversaw for some time the Cyber CIL.

It did exist.

That was primarily an I&R type of service with some peer support and some IL skills, but the Cyber CIL did exist for a number of years and then funding fell by the wayside.

So it kind of fell by the wayside as well.

It did happen for awhile.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Also, it's the CIL that does the reporting on both the 704 report and this program.

So you're not cyber.
Completely.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  As a state funded CIL, we're not required to do the 704 Report.

However, we count the work, all of the work done in our LIFE program, our career path program, et cetera, goes into CIL suite and we set up a program in there for Career Path services so we can quickly pull that out and provide information on it.

But that has not been in any type of discouragement for us.

And I do hear that we may eventually have to do that 704 report and I'll be coming to another training for that.

JUDITH HOLT:  Michael, did you have another question?

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I was just going to ask earlier, were you all the ones that were talking about the forms and how you come up with rates to charge and all that?

JUDITH HOLT:  on their rates to charge and forms and things, we'll be getting into that in a lot more depth tomorrow.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Thank you.

JUDITH HOLT:  Because I know that's a question that a lot of folks have.

Thanks.

Other questions here?

Well, we want to thank these folks for all their information.

What did you learn?

No one learned anything.
This is discouraging.  
Oh, yes ma'am.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I learned some possible ways that we can build that I didn't know.

JUDITH HOLT:  That's very good.

Possible ways you can build.

It doesn't mean you have step one, step two, step three guaranteed.

Do you understand there isn't a template for partnerships and collaboration.

There is strategies.

There is listening to ideas, but y'all have to come up with your own possibilities.

Other comments?  Oh, over here.  Got it?  Paula is trying to see how many places she can be at once, so far she is doing really well.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Find out if your local school districts have ELOs, other ways to earn credits aside from traditional school room classroom time.

JUDITH HOLT:  That's interesting because I'm going back to Utah and see if I can figure that one out.

I thought that was very interesting, very cool strategy.

Other suggestions, ideas, comments?

This is the most quiet you've been.

I know you want to leave.

But we're going to end on a, remember tomorrow we're talking money, fee-for-services, how to transition to that.

How you deal with a lot of those issues that are really going to be a little bit sticky.

They sound wonderful, but you need to be careful about them.

So we're going to end with Brian and I'm going to ask him if he'll come up here so he's got a really good camera view here.

Remember he talked about how to spell disability, and we want this, we don't want the whole 20 minute speech, which was wonderful, by the way.

But we do want this so we can use this, folks can use it with their youth and young adult groups.

BRYAN MOSELY:  So I'll be brief as I can, I want to say it's totally an honor.

I am really honored just to know that you guys took on to this because it came about for me.

It wasn't really handed down from Obama.

It actually is a result of when I understood that they added a new word to the dictionary, dis, and they put it in front of ability, and I've had ability all my life, but when I lost my sight I started getting dissed like the eight of us who were dissed for our ability to get the rooms paid for, but we got moved all over the place and treated badly.

So and as an employment skills trainer working with other people, it really intrigued me to think, you know, what is disability?

They can't say I don't have the ability because as far as I'm concerned, I can see better than any of you in here if I'm looking at the right thing, it's just a matter of what it is.

So in saying that I see things differently, I came up with the acronym for disability to kind of motivate some of my clients to think positive or more strongly about themselves.

So I'll do this slowly:  Disability for me represents the acronym Distinctive Individual with Skills, Abilities, Brains, Intelligence, Life, Insight, and Talent Yearning.

Real quick on that note I will say thank you guys again, but I do want to mention my other push is OH, YEA, that's Occupational Horizons Youth Empowering Activity.

JUDITH HOLT:  For a small consulting fee, that Brian can help you too with acronyms for your programs.

BRYAN MOSELY:  We're talking money tomorrow.

JUDITH HOLT:  Have a great evening.  Thank you so much.