Event ID: 2860662 Event Started: 3/9/2016 8:00:00 PM ---------- Please stand by for realtime-captions. >> This is Robbin Bull Amon the background doing technology, just a few housekeeping items, presenters are on mute but everyone else I is on mute to decrease background noise. We will keep everybody on mute during the presentation. However, if people need to come off me to ask a question that will be okay during the presentation unless Megan indicates otherwise. You can also type questions in the chat box during the presentation, that is certainly okay to do, they will be monitoring that during the webinar. And, I am going to start the recording in just a moment, that will be making's cue to start the webinar. . >> Welcome, everyone. My name is Megan Cote, for the last year I have been serving as the project specialist for both early identification or referral as well as family engagement at NCDB. This is the final webinar in a series of six webinars, related to the early identification and referral process. We will be focusing on community programs, links for the previous webinar recordings on the guide, the action planning process, part C, the medical system and EDHI can be found on the NCDB website. We continue to be grateful for all the states that have shared their insight and all the webinars. If you have missed them, feel free to go in and get a look. With us today we are lucky to have presenting, Maurice Belote, the project coordinator for the California deaf blind services, as well as Julie Bernas-Pierce, the project director of Blind Babies Foundation, part of the Junior blind foundation and joining us too will be Myrna Medina the family engagement coordinator for the California deaf blind project. So the plans of our meeting today will be fat Maurice and colleagues the show work they've done in California then we will have a Q&A for folks who have joined can ask questions of the presenters also we can open it to have a discussion about what works in your individual states and presenters have said they prefer a less formal format for the webinar. If you have questions, feel free to jump in to the discussion. You can do that by pressing star six to unmute your phone or use the hand raise feature you see at the top of the toolbar, that looks like a person with the arm in the air. You can also put your question in the chat pod. While Maurice and pals are presenting I will watch the chat pod. I notice a question coming through, I will make sure to let you guys know. I now pass it over to the California team to share their stories and insight with you. Take it away, we are looking forward to what you have to share today. >> Thank you, Megan and Robbin and market at NCDB for your help in setting this up. Our topic today is community programs, specifically related to early identification and referral. Many years ago when our project was in its former state, we were based at the California Department of education. And, when we were there, we had the good fortune to be -- I have to wave my arms to keep my lights from going on. We had the good fortune of being right in the middle of all of the part H as part C was called back then, part H agencies as well. We actually shared an office with the California early intervention technical assistance network. When we were at the Department of Ed, it was -- these linkages to early intervention and even more specifically to early identification and referral came fairly easily to us. When we made the decision to move to the state University in the late '90s one of the downsides of that move, although there were many upsides, upsides outweigh the downsides the one of the downsides was losing the connection. Paralyzed pretty soon when we got here, that we needed to find new ways to develop partnerships around the state. So that is what Megan asked us to talk about today. Please feel free to ask questions. Comments as we go along. I know it sounds a little cliche, but we have a lot to learn from all of you. Frequently when I am with the deaf blind network I feel like I am with the smartest people in the room so I would love to hear what you are all thinking. Speaking of cliches, I -- let me get the hackneyed cliche graphic a partnerships out of the way. You knew I would have to have one. I will describe this for anybody who is not seeing the Adobe room. This is one of those images with amorphous automaton type people, each responsible for holding a gear and they are all moving together. An image of partnership. Most art years or everybody placing -- most art years or everybody placing puzzle pieces into place or something like that but beyond the cliche partnerships are critical to the way our projects operate. We don't do anything without partners. Let me explain how we see that. If we want to do something, if we see a need in the state for a specific activity, the first thing we do is look around and see is anybody else doing something similar. And, if they are, then we find out if we can join them. If we look around the state and we don't see anybody doing what we feel is needed, then we start asking around saying we have this idea, if we are to do this, would you join us? And then, the third way we do this, Julie Bernas-Pierce is very aware of this, if we see something good happening that someone else is doing, we latch onto that and say while this is a great activity can we be part of this too. And really this is the only way we could survive in a big state like California. We are a small project there are only four of us and plus an administrative specialist. So, there is no way we could do what we do without developing partnerships. >> Now, the thing about -- I will talk about that with capacity building -- are other thing besides partnerships is capacity building. When I was a very young teacher, I sort of got off on the idea that I helped -- held the secret key to my students and only I knew what made them do certain things and how to interact with all of them. It didn't take me long at all to realize I did not want to hold the secret key to my students. I wanted everybody to have the secret key. The more people, the better. So what we are always doing and what we have done in both initiatives we will talk about today, will be focusing on building capacity. I know we all talk about that, but for us, it is really critical that we set up systems so that people can do all of these things we do when we are not there. A lot of collaborative activities are built on personal relationships with people. I really believe personal relationships are really important. And it is how collaborative activities oftentimes get off the ground. But, of the problem with collaborative activities built solely on personal relationships is as soon as one person leaves the position, retires or whatever, all of a sudden the collaboration comes to a screeching halt. So we are trying to set up systems that stay in place beyond the personal relationships they are built on. So I want to talk about two key community partnerships that we do specific to early identification and referral. One is our early intervention identification training initiative, and after that I will talk about the family leadership initiative and are network of family support providers. Photo would like to do is talk about each of these and then have Julie Bernas-Pierce from Blind Babies Foundation speak to one of our partners in the early intervention initiative and we are hoping that Myrna Medina, our family specialist will be on the line to talk about our family leadership initiative if not I will do that. So let me show you the partners in our early intervention identification referral and training initiative. These are our wonderful, dynamic partners and they really are an amazing bunch. We love -- not to sound too much like Donald Trump, but we love our partners. And without them, we could not have the kind of impact we have around the state. For early intervention initiative our partners, for those of you who slept through high school Spanish children and parents center and Blind Babies Foundation, Centro is based at Cal State University Los Angeles which is part of our state University system, Blind Babies Foundation, which Julie Bernas-Pierce is the program director of, they serve, I have a map that shows this but they serve 14 counties in northern and central California. And they just celebrated their 67th year is that right? 67th year so an amazing run for an agency like Blind Babies Foundation. Blind children center in Los Angeles for the County of Los Angeles and to the left of that is that the Los Angeles unified school District. They have a program called Hibbitts, parents and visually impaired infants together. They may be changing that name but for now we call it pivot. And LA gets its own -- LA unified gets its own place in our collaboration because of its size LA unified has a total enrollment of just over 900,000 students. They've got 911 schools in the district, I looked it up lastly, in addition to that 187 charter schools so LA unified is its own world down there. And to the right of LA unified is the center for early intervention on deafness or what we call CEID. I have a bit of a cold and working around here. CEID is an early intervention program in Berkeley that serves the San Francisco they area specific to deafness and deaf blindness. With CEID, we added them in this grant cycle because we collaborated on a first five of Alameda County grant. First five is a project in California are funded by smoking tax money, proposition ten smoking tax I think it is a 50-cent tax on a pack of cigarettes that goes to early intervention preschool activities in the states. We wrote a collaborative grant with CEID for a two year, twice a month play group for families of children who are deaf blind. That has been running for over two years. One -- once the First Five money ran out, CEID made a commitment to continue our play group. We have that still going on. Below that is Junior blind of America or Junior blind. Junior blind was a large -- is a large agency based in Los Angeles and they actually just joined with Blind Babies Foundation and they are now a program of Junior Blind it may have early intervention services in five counties in Southern California. Lastly blind children's learning Center which is in Orange County. Not in our current grant cycle, but I put it on here we are really six agencies plus blind children's learning Center. But, we still maintain a very close relationship with them. I was just working with them this week on the senses, answering questions they had about children who have cerebral visual impairment and auditory processing issues. We still have a close working relationship. All of the Southern California agencies shown on the slide are all connected through something called the birth to five network of Southern California. They are all connected and we are part of that, Myrna Medina, a family specialist is the parent liaison to the birth to five network and I serve on the advisory committee. So that is a way of keeping them all connected. I will explain what this initiative is the first of all I want to point out this may look like this is heavily focused on Southern California. There is a reason for that. Here I have a map of the four counties that make up the LA metropolitan area, Los Angeles County, Orange County, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. These four counties, Justise four counties, have a population of just under 18 million people. We are talking about it huge number of people. The population center of California is in Southern California but these four counties have a huge. I put up a slide that shows you from Wikipedia that shows all the states by population in California's population just under 40 million. Just these four counties are bigger than all but four states in the United States in terms of population. And in terms of size, just San Bernardino for instance is so big that as a County is bigger, I looked it up it's bigger then nine states in the United States, just the County of San Bernardino. We are talking about large geographic area and huge population. So we have a heavy focus on Southern California. >> The initiative we developed with all of these agencies started in the last cycle and continued into this cycle. What we do, we offer training and technical assistance to everybody on the staff on an ongoing basis and we offer it either biannually, try annually or quarterly. What that does is it filled to capacity. The early interventionist in each of these agencies then have information they need to not only to refer kids to California deaf blind services when necessary, but at the least, get them on our senses and they also have the information they need to better meet their needs when we can't be there. So, we have done extensive training with all of these agencies. A couple weeks ago I was at Blind Babies Foundation, talking specifically, among other things, talking about the latest research on cochlear implants, talking about intervenors and modules. We really focused on identification and what does it mean to be deaf blind. What kids should be counted and which kids shouldn't. And kind of walking through that process, explaining to their new staff the importance of the census and how the census works. So, it can be a large group training or what we have done in some cases we have really seasons, veteran early intervention providers that some of these agencies working with us as long as we have been funded. We have some people that have partnered with us since we were first funded in 1987. In some cases, what we do, we work specifically with new people as they come on to the project. We have agreements with these agencies as they bring early intervention providers on we become part of their training program. They get all the information about identifying children who are deaf blind and then referring them to us or getting what they need from us. >> On this map, on the screen, a map of California by County. It is color-coded blue on the map are the counties that are served by line babies foundation. They serve northern California a little central coast and part of the Central Valley. Green is served by all the agencies in Southern California such as blind children's center, Junior Blind and the other center based in the LA metropolitan area. And purple is Orange County that is blind children's learning Center. I will keep this map as we go through the presentation today but you can see that we are not covering all the counties. I will get to that, but with the early intervention initiative, we have this many counties covered and we have all of the two major population centers of California covered. Read probably should not be there but red at the bottom is San Diego County. Even though we don't have a provider that we work with specifically down there, we have people who have been affiliated with our project, former project people like Shelley Darren with San Diego city schools and they serve as our liaison to San Diego County. And the red one North is Sacramento that I will explain in a minute. That is our early training initiative. Rockets of these early intervention agencies have been amazing to partner with. We learn as much with them as I think we do from us. It has been a really good collaboration. >> The other program I want to describe today is our CDBS California deaf blind services network of family support providers we call them FSPs. And what FSPs are, our volunteer parents they happen to all be moms. We have not had a dad joined the network yet. We would really love to but so far they have all been moms but they are volunteer parents who are linked to the family to family support networks of their local family resource centers, family empowerment centers, PTIs or CPRCs community parent resource centers. These parents, what we do, we help them link to the parent to parent support networks in their area. We help facilitate that by going to their local agencies and introducing them to the agencies. We work with the agencies to provide our family members with whatever family to family support training the agency requires in order for these people to provide parent to parent support. If the agency can't do it, then we provide that. We have the parent to parent training curriculum that was developed by the state and we do that ourselves. And then we provide ongoing support throughout the year to all of our family support providers. We bring them together once a year in -- usually in Southern California, and we also get them information throughout the year, they are also involved very closely in a lot of the activities that we do. And then, we provide training and technical assistance to the respective agencies on issues specific to deaf blindness. We make sure they have whatever materials or information they need to meet the needs of families who contact them about deaf blindness. Regardless of whether or not they get connected to the parent that is part of our network. >> The side of four kinds of federally -- these are the four kinds of federally funded and state training systems we have we have family resource centers, family empowerment centers, parent training and information centers or PTIs and community parent resource centers. The graphic on the bottom that is a graphic of a pier sticking on the ocean with waves crashing up. The way I see a lot of these agencies, if you can see me I am putting my hand like the pier and the waves are crashing underneath my hand. The piers like these agencies. We have quite a few agencies in California that are large, comprehensive, family support agencies. They continue to exist regardless of what ever funding they have. Some may be, at times, PTIs. Some may be, at times, parent resource centers. Some might be family resource centers and some might be family empowerment centers. Sometimes an agency will be all of those. So, this is the 47 family resource centers we have, generally birth to three and California. No matter where you live in California, theoretically you live within the boundaries of an early start family resource Center and they are connected with the statewide network. Then we have things called family empowerment centers, all the family empowerment centers in California. They don't cover the the entire state, the they are specifically ages three to 21. They pick up for the family resource centers leave off. Then, we have a number of PTIs the California. They are all very, very different. So, depending on the PTI, their focus can be quite different. For instance in the bay area, we have the disability rights education and Defense fund. That is mostly a public policy and legal agency. Not super warm and fuzzy, like some of them, but we have others like parents helping parents or support for families in San Francisco that really are focused on support groups and referrals and all of those things. We have three community parent resource centers. I notice their funding is, the RFP for the new CPRC grant just was announced. The deadline for that is coming up. >> So here is a picture of Myrna Medina, a family specialist on the right and that is her son Norman. Myrna, I am hoping she will join us on the call but Norman has been in the hospital for four weeks. He was very ill. I am glad to say he is doing better, but he is down on the lower right. The two women in the middle, Erlinda and Miriam, charter members of our family network of providers. The way our family support divider network went is that it did not exactly go as we planned. Megan asked me to be brutally honest here so I will be. The idea was that we place these parents in family resource centers or PTIs, wherever is the best fit for them in their local area. We would help them connect to the parent to parent network within their FRC and we would support the FRCs or agencies on issues related to deaf blindness. One of the problems, and I will just be really honest with you all, is that even though almost all these agencies said they have parent-to-parent networks, that wasn't always exactly true. Some of them are much more formal, some more a lot less formal and I think some of them were as informal as it was just being in somebody's head. Is somebody called and said I would like to meet another parent who has a child who is deaf blind, the ability to make that connection existed within somebody's head saying oh I think I know somebody who can do that or it might be index cards and a file box or something. So there weren't always parents parent networks in place where we thought they were. The second problem was, we learned this through focus groups, is at the family resource centers told us they very rarely get calls about it specific disability category like deaf blindness. Usually, the calls are where is a good school, I need a good pediatrician, I need a good ophthalmologist, things like that. In addition, a lot of times, family members would not use the term deaf blind or describe their child in a way that would make that person answering the phone think that this was somebody who might need to be connected to one of our families. So we worked with this system and fretted about how to make this work and fretting while we were fretting if the parents who were involved didn't make it work their own way. What happened was, while we were trying to fit everybody into a parent-to-parent support network, a lot of these families just started becoming leaders within their agencies or even starting one. So market -- Martha De La Torre who was supposed to be presenting today, she went to work for one of the family resource centers at Long Beach Memorial Hospital and she is now one of their program directors. We have had other family support providers who went on to be employed by their agencies and we have had family support providers who have started groups. We had a couple of family support providers start in Southern California, charge syndrome group, now growing strong and has regular activities and training and support events. >> So, I want to close out by just saying that if you take the family support providers that we have in California, the map that did have a lot of holes has fewer holes. That now we have a lot of the state covered either through one of the early intervention agencies or through the family support provider network that we have in California. There are still holes. You can see on the lower left there is two counties on the coast, we need to do a better job at that is San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties. However, we have Perl on the board and she is an amazing resource and is everybody on the central coast. So she is a great resource down there right now. And, this is to meet a real needs me a real needs assessment for what we need to do with our project we have Modesto and Stockton sitting there in the middle of the state that are very well served with this current model. So, we are looking to expand our reach there. And I think that is it. So, what I want to do now is turn this over to Julie Bernas-Pierce, from Blind Babies Foundation. As one of our amazing, dynamic partners, she can explain a little bit about our collaboration. >> Thank you. Very much for asking me to represent Blind Babies Foundation and also the other partners. And to echo Maurice's comments and maybe at a little context from Blind Babies Foundation. The relationship that we have with California Deaf Blind Services is one of the richest and closest, most integrated collaborations that we have in our organization. And it has been ongoing for some years now and integrated to the extent that at one point we cohabitated in an office in San Francisco. So, we could not get much closer than that. Plan babies foundation, as Maurice said, has 11 vision impairment specialists, who work with families in 14 northern and central California counties. And, the number of families that we see in the course of a year, our current families, primarily focused for free. And additional children that we will see three to six years of age. A number about 500. We see a lot of families in the course of the year with myriad disability constellations some are visually impaired only, although that represents a much smaller percentage of the children with whom we work. And, the greater number, children with multiple impairments including those children who are deaf blind. The opportunity California Deaf Blind Services offered to us when they broke us into their grants, really enriched the knowledge base of our vision impairment specialists and also their confidence with regard to those children who come on to their caseload who are deaf blind. And also those who are in process of identification so we can make early referral to California Deaf Blind Services. Now in California, where we have mandatory hearing screenings at birth, oftentimes for children who are diagnosed as deaf blind, the hearing loss may be identified first. And then the vision impairment at a later time. So, we are brought into the picture. I am thinking in terms of maybe when the child is a few months of age, although in some cases we will have children who are identified with a vision loss and hearing loss at a year, year to two years of age. We are often dismayed that has been the case. But, once the jewel identification has been made, our staff is involved along with other team members in providing direct service for those children and families. Primarily in a home-based model. So, when Maurice approached us about writing line babies foundation into their grant cycle, to provide training we so welcomed that opportunity. It manifest and quarterly trainings where Maurice or David Brown, Jackie Chan Lee at the time of family specialist, would come to our staff meetings and provide training in areas of diagnoses that included deaf blindness or assessment, tools that we could use that would be relevant for children who are deaf blind. Understanding hearing loss better, is an area where although we have a great deal of training by pediatric ophthalmologist, I think all of our staff would say that this knowledge base of hearing loss, understanding hearing loss, the myriad types of hearing loss and the tools and treatments for children with hearing loss was a real deficit for the group. And in addition I would say that it heightened the staff awareness about the unique qualities of children who are deaf blind. Certainly different from those who are vision impaired, those who are hearing impaired, this whole integration into a very different manifestation of disability for the population who is deaf blind. It really became much more integrated into the minds of our vision impairment specialists in a way that had not been before. >> We also received training on communication. Communication tools for young children with vision impairment, and educational strategies. And I think what resonated for a lot of our staff as well, with sensory integration. A think as we learned more and more about sensory integration, more children on the caseload, it became clearer that more children on our vision impairment specialists caseload were in need of some of the strategies and techniques that benefit those children. Recapping here, I have to say that the training built into the grant cycle provided our staff with the confidence they needed to work with a population of children who are deaf blind on their caseload. It also heightened their awareness of who this population is and eased the connection that we would make almost immediately to CBF. In addition I would say that the door swinging blow -- both ways has made a huge difference in regards to our staff competence and confidence. The staff of California Deaf Blind Services has been so willing to meet us halfway, not only with regards to training, but also joining in, as Maurice said, too many of the activities that we have going on in our organization, in order to meet the family's directly, and speak with them, to meet other professionals who come to our events and staff meetings. >> And it was Murray's to -- it was Maurice, who I think, first for me, stated the phrase building local capacity and I use it all the time with regard to not only our relationship with CDBS but other ways in which we can integrate into services for the children we serve. A couple of examples are that Maurice and his team will join us at our family camps that we hold at enchanted hills camp in Napa, California. And he and his team always bring interns. They are there, joining in all the activities, seeing families and a natural environment, engaging fully in the recreation families enjoy so much in a casual sort of conversational way, talking with families of children who are deaf blind or whose children have multiple impairments, providing them with the information they need. We hold events every year they join us for that as well, the staff of CDBS. We have actually had a couple vision impairment specialists to have taken the early, early intervenor training and so that cross hybridization has made a huge difference with regard to early referral, early identification. Because as soon as they are is a diagnosis or suspicion of deaf blindness as a diagnosis, we are e-mailing, on the phone, contacting CDBS and bringing them on board to whatever level is needed with other professionals are families to make sure that the connection gets made, the technical assistance if necessary is provided especially so early on because we are talking about families birth to three. As Maurice indicated, sometimes families don't know who or choose not to use the deaf blind label yet they know those two sensory impairments are there. By having access to such experts as California Deaf Blind Services, we are able to ease some of the concerns families have and up close and personal, bring those relationships to families to make all the difference in how the family understands the diagnosis, their access to resources and their comfort advocating for their children through a whole new lands and perspective of knowledge of what the deaf blind diagnosis means. >> I think that -- and try to think that there are some other ways. Certainly I guess a couple more things. Maurice and his team are at all of our state what conferences for teachers of the visually impaired. So this visibility on their part, their understanding of the benefit of being present and visible and integrated into those conferences has made a huge difference, broadening the scope of awareness well beyond the individual partners Maurice listed earlier. And, in addition, to the events and activities and so forth and conferences, we have two of our Blind Babies Foundation vision impairment specialists on the CDBS advisory board. They bring back from those meetings to our staff meetings the latest information they have acquired and it is a continuation of that building of local capacity that I think has contributed tremendously to that early identification referral to CDBS for all of these areas where we provide service. I guess you can tell I can't say enough about the relationship we have with CDBS. It is always growing, always changing. We are talking with Maurice and his team about what is new, what we need to do to be better representatives for the families of children who are deaf blind and I think if we had any request of CDBS, maybe change going forward it would be we would love a larger piece of their time and expertise in direct technical assistance and so forth but I think that is an outgrowth of just feeling as I said at the beginning this is one of the richest and most beneficial relationship, professional relationships we have. So I hope the specifics helped to flesh out the nature of the relationship and how it works for us. Thank you. >> Julie, I am speechless. This is Maurice. I am speechless. You are much, much too kind. >> It has been great. It was very easy to fill this role because as I started writing my notes and getting ready to put things down my list got way longer than the time allowed as you know. I think on individual and agency level this has been a tremendous collaboration for the families and for our staff. >> Megan and the spirit of full disclosure here I want to say a couple things. One is that, and Mark is on this cold so he knows is our birth to three numbers in the latest census report are down actually but that has nothing to do with our collaborative partners or their commitment or anything like that. What happened was quite simple is our administrative specialist resigned very unexpectedly a year ago January. That was right at the time we were starting to send out the big mailing so we did not have the person to do that so we had to skip a year in this data collection we only added children we personally knew about that we only actively serve about 100 of the 1200 on our senses. So, we expect our members to pop right back up in the current census data collection we are doing right now. That is number one. Number two is, I am so glad, Julie said what she did. One of the things I would like to point out is that this system we have developed is in perfect by any means. It doesn't -- what it does, it gets people to us through an agency specific to sensory disabilities either blindness or deafness. So we are not yet like gathering kids who are yet been served straight into our services. However, we do have a system called urgent technical assistance. We have two levels of technical assistance. Urgent and non- urgent. Urgent technical assistance is provided in cases where an infant or toddler is referred to rest and we are the very first place they have reached out to. They are deceiving no services of -- they are receiving node services any kind and technical assistance we drop what we are doing and get there and deal with it right away. So, it goes very fast getting them connected. But because of the size of our states, we have learned so much from some of the states that work directly with their children's hospitals or pediatric ophthalmologist or audiologists or whoever it is but our state the size and small size of our project make that impossible that is why we developed this plan for having so many competent and committed, for lack of a better word, boots on the ground to do that for us. >> Maurice? Two things if I could. One is a few months ago as part of our monthly and services with pediatric ophthalmologist, we met at University of California, San Francisco with one of their pediatric ophthalmologist and had David Brown with us from CDBS. She presented the pediatric ophthalmologist, presented her whole PowerPoint presentation she was giving to other pediatric ophthalmologist to the American Academy of pediatric ophthalmology on providing vision care two children who are deaf blind. It was really an extraordinary opportunity. The bridge and she did of the medical information and developmental and educational information that surrounds the diagnosis of deaf blindness, was really quite exceptional. To your point, there is some enlightenment at least in the bay area with regard to pediatric ophthalmologist. >> And the deaf blind population. We are really delighted to see that. The second thing I wanted to mention was Sherry Nelson has put a question up here about the relationship with CEID or the center of early intervention on deafness. I meant to mention that because our vision impairment specialists, CEID is also a one of them. There is a play group that CEID has developed that involves children who are deaf blind and Maurice, I'm sure you know more about it than I, but we do intercept with CEID at any time we can weather it is joint home visits for this kind of intersection of deafness, vision loss and the infusion of staff from CDBS into that group. That addresses Sherry's question. >> This is Maurice again. Sherri, every partner that we work with takes our information and does something a little bit different. What we are doing with CEID, we are doing staff training but also they are heavily involved in [ Indiscernible ] they have all their parent and teaching educators staff at CEID going through our cohorts. So we have a bunch of CEID people right now in modules one, three, six and eight. More than -- more so than any other partner agencies, they have really latched on to online training. They are getting a lot of information. I want to leave enough time for Myrna to say a few words if she is on the phone. I see her number there, if you could unmute, if you are there and want to say a few words about the family support providers? Are you there? I'm not entirely certain that is her number there, the three T three number is her cell phone, let's give her a minute. While we wait I will put up my final slide. >> Can you hear me? >> Yes. >> Hi I am sorry I am having trouble with my phone. >> Are you able to say a few words? >> Yes. What you want me to say, Maurice? >> Did you hear what we said earlier, did you catch any of it? >> I had to leave because they were rounding, the doctors were rounding exactly when you were talking about the family support providers. I had to put the phone down but I heard -- >> Could you say one or two minutes about what the family support providers have done to support early identification and referral to CDBS and what they have done to direct children and families to CDBS and services for children who are deaf blind? >> Yes. I am happy to say that some of our family support providers they not just linked with family support but the family resource Center in their area but some of them work for them. So that was super on their side. That will give us more information on new boards or early children. They don't have screening kits, early diagnosis they give us a heads up on that or they give information to the parent and it really encourages them to give us a call and make the connection. Many parents are lost and don't know what to do at the beginning. That is one of the things our family support providers -- it is nice for them to be close to their family centers and be part of that connection with CDBS. And if they encounter problems they just give me a call because both are connected with me because I am the family specialist and we immediately help sort the problems and get the families connected with CDBS also with other activities like Maurice mentioned earlier it is a family event and also we get families from their too. So the FSP family support provider staff attend like the annual picnic and right away give us a heads up on [ Indiscernible ], referrals to us that give us the information. They definitely encourage families to get connected with us. Many families are not ready. They will -- deaf blindness is a heavy, heavy diagnosis they are lost or just don't want to get lots of information [ Indiscernible ] >> This is Megan I am so glad you were able to join us. We are sorry your son is not feeling well. >> For making the difference. >> Like I said I said I am sorry I had to put the phone down but I have been waiting for the Dr. To come and they just came at 12:15. I needed to join that too. So thank you for having me in the last five minutes. >> So glad you could join us. Megan, I was going to show my last slide one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons for those of you can't see it it is a Dr. And patient the patient is approval and approval has a down on that ties on the back, the poodle says me I keep my collar on. And the reason why I like this cartoon is because this is what I feel like when I expose our project to all of the wonderful other projects around the country is sort of makes me feel very exposed week this is what we have come up with in all of its glory for better or for worse. And so I am very interested to hear from other people whether it is today -- unaware out of time -- this summer when we are all at the summit in Washington, if you have ideas or comments on anything we have talked about I would be very interested to hear if you are doing something similar or if you have ideas for strengthening what we are doing. >> This has been amazing, Maurice and Julie. Both of you and Myrna, you too for sliding in at the end. The work you are doing is amazing. Here is what I would like to quickly close with. We have some polling questions we need to put up to make sure everybody feels like the webinar was helpful and awesome which I am sure you all think it was because it blew my mind. And I want to also remind you guys that because they had so much to share today, which was awesome, we will be hosting a drop in call on Wednesday, March 23 at 12:00 Pacific time. To continue the discussion about the work Maurice and Julie and the folks in California have done, and allow other states that have been doing work in this area, about to begin, to come together and continue the conversation. So, we have put a polling question up about that today. If we have a follow-up call with folks -- would folks be interested in joining the discussion. Thank you for answering those questions. If anyone wants follow-up as result of this webinar or just related to the classes or just in general, Mark and I are happy to help and are here for you. I would say there is no silly question and no question that is too small. If we don't know the answer, we are happy to try to connect you to the right people. Feel free to let us know if you would like some help. , to again thank these guys for spending their time today presenting all the time you spent preparing the presentation to share with us. Maurice I now see through your presentation your love of maps is a cool thing, to the breakdown with the population numbers are in your state. I can tell you have done a lot of important work about how to hit those different regions based on the number of kids, etc. That was a really neat thing to do. I want to thank Robbin for running the webinar. So much involved in doing this, she is so good at it. , to say thank you to Robbin for your help and for your beautiful webinar announcement. At the login information for the drop in will be the same as today but we will also have that posted on the initiative space bar you can go there to find it and I want to thank Mark, too he is my co-lead on this initiative and we help show this work together so I appreciate him for all his help, too. For today I think that is it and we will wrap it up thank you to all of you who took your time out of your day today to listen to these guys share. I hope if you are interested in continuing the conversation, that you will join us again on March 23 at 12:00 Pacific time. Thanks, everybody, have a great rest of your day. >> Thank you. >> Team actually, thank you, Maurice. >> You're welcome. [Event concluded]