Event ID: 2887603 Event Started: 4/13/2016 7:00:00 PM ---------- Please stand by for realtime captions. >> Please stand by for realtime captions. >> >> This is Robbin Bull with NCDB and I will get you started with some housekeeping items. I'd like to welcome you all to the webinar. We have an illustrious panel and it's nice to see all your faces. I will go through the housekeeping items before I hand it over to Megan who will kick off today's webinar. As you experienced when you came in, all the participant phone lines have been placed on mute to minimize background noise. I want to let you know that this webinar will be recorded for future viewing. I think that is it. Megan, after you hear the announcement for the recording you can get started. >> Hello everyone. My name is Megan Cote and for a little over a year now I have served as the initiative lead for early education and referral as well as family engagement at NCDB and I want to thank everyone for joining us today for the first in a series of two webinars where we will be highlighting partnerships of state deaf-blind projects and parent centers across the country . With us presenting today we have Ruth Ann King project coordinator for the West Virginia SenseAbilities project, Sue Ann Houser director of the Pennsylvania Deaf-Blind Project and Lori Brew special project coordinator at PEAL, Clara Berg the President of NSED B who recently retired from her role as the family engagement coordinator for the New York Deaf-Blind Collaborative as she dances in her seat in her retirement, and Godfrey Rivera who is the codirector of the Metropolitan Parent Center in New York. Before they share their stories I want to give everybody a back history as to how the webinar came to be. Back in the fall of 2014 OSEP sent a letter to both the state deaf-blind projects and parent centers urging them to work together to provide training and support to families of children who are deaf-blind so they can successfully advocate on behalf of their children. As a result of this the family engagement technical workgroup comprised of representatives from NCDB , regional parent centers, state deaf-blind projects, and S ADD, cadre, and the [ Indiscernible ] syndrome foundation was created and in June 2015 a form created by the group was sent to state projects and parent centers to complete to gather to describe their current collaborative work. By August 2015 NCDB had received 21 completed forms and then these forms were carefully reviewed to identify specific collaborative strategies and activities and sorted into four categories which were networking, cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. That -- that encompasses the work across the network. For those of you who have not yet seen the report, Robbin will put it up on the shares screen so everyone can see where it is housed on the NCDB website. This is the actual report and it is called "Working Together for Families" and state deaf-blind project and parent center collaborations. In the middle there is a brown toolbar that says home, overview, strategies, stories, acknowledgments, and that there is a PDF version of the report. That gives you each category and they are self explanatory. The overview explains how it came to be and then the state stories have specific in-depth examples. We have state stories from Maryland, West Virginia, and Montana. The acknowledgment section is important and it lists the people that were part of the technical workgroup that were important in helping us drive this work as well as the states that were so kind to complete the form and submit it on behalf of their state. Underneath you see the four levels that I mentioned. Networking, cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. When you click on each of those you will see examples provided by each of the states for strategies. If you haven't had a chance to look at it more in depth, look at it later because it's full of great ideas I think would be helpful for everyone. Now what I will do is mention that if your state has yet to have an opportunity to complete the form and send it in and you would like to share your state story, please send it to myself or my partner in crime on the family engagement initiative by DeMolay because we see this document as a revolving document so there is always a continuous opportunity to celebrate and share. If you join us today and have yet to complete the form would like to tell us would you have done feel free to contact us and we will gather your information and added to the report. Without further ado let me turn it over to Ruth Ann and she will go first and then Lori and 44 will go next and then Clara and Godfrey will take us to the end. If you have questions feel free to put them in the chat pod or you can use the hand raising feature at the top of the toolbar that is the icon of a person with a hand raised. I will try to watch the chat pod and let presenters know if someone has a question. Between each presenter we will pause for a minute and make sure no one has any questions. Another way you can ask is hit start 30 to take yourself off mute and then ask your question and then put yourself back on mute with Star 6 again. >> Hello. I am Ruth Ann and I'm in West Virginia and I'm the one person that is here by myself today because Godfrey and Clara on either end of the screen are both from New York and the women from Pittsburgh are together. I'm not really alone in this adventure. You notice on the list of the participants today you see the name Brenda Lamkin and she is the new person serving the PTI in West Virginia and on that our project director was in the other room and I texted her and said get in here. She's our project director and we both work with SenseAbilities. We will talk with you today about family engagement in West Virginia . In some of this it says parents but we use the word family in West Virginia because as I am sure is the case with those of you working with families in your various states our families come in all kinds of packages. Sometimes it's the grandparents, it could be the great aunt or siblings, it's the recipients of the information that taken to heart and serve these people. >> Annette helped us to form the graph that talks about how family engagement happens and how we plan the resources and funding and it's a little different in West Virginia with the deaf-blind project than it is in some of the other states and I will begin by explaining that. We are located in the SEA West Virginia Department of Education. We are called SenseAbilities , that is what we named the deaf-blind project here. We are located in the West Virginia Department of Education. >> We have another entity that is housed in the same building we are that serves the state called the Parent Educator Resource Center. We have 55 counties here and I will explain that in 37 we have a Parent Educator Resource Center. The last of these is the West Virginia Parent Training and Information and they are housed in the central part of the state in Buckhannon. I will go through each of those and show you how we coordinate and blend resources and funding. We are known for that here. >> With the West Virginia SenseAbilities, we are funded through OSEP like the rest of your grandson we are different because we are housed at the SEA. Annette and I have been in our position since 1996 and Annette before that and over the years we have built relationships and that's what makes things work in our state. As Annette said we play in the sandbox with a lot of people over the years and have gotten to know them and coordinated our services. We have about 112 kids on our senses that have dual sensory loss and we are also known for serving the needs of other kids and their families, most often families with children who have more significant multiple disabilities. People around the state will call and ask questions about those children as well and we can either refer to them or serve them as we do our kids on the deaf-blind census. We coordinate with many agency is to build capacity. I think being in a rural state makes that a little easier. Annette and I have been asked many times, how do you get that extra grant from birth to go three or how do you work so well with adult service agencies? We set out each other's boards and see each other at the grocery store sometimes. We are together at meetings. We go out to lunch together and say I have this going on and it's exciting and let me share that with you. Do you want to work with us? It's built and built over the years as I'm sure it has in many of your states as well. >> And then the PERC center, that is the other one here at the state education agency at the West Virginia Department of education. Here is why it's different and why I'm sitting alone is because we had a coordinator of our PERC that was a good friend of myself and Annette who had worked at the department many years , she was a great worker with us and doing everything and just retired six months ago. So Megan said tell us about what happens when that happened. >> Annette went to the staff meeting and said you will love the new Betsy, because Betsy was who had the job many years, and she said her name is Nancy and you have to run and meet her. When I talked to her about working with family she said I feel like I'm coming home again. I went down and we had a lovely few hours of talking about what we had done in the past two coordinate with PERC project . She already had ideas going about what was good for the future and I loved those ideas. She just started and there are 37 of 55 counties that have PERC and they are apparent and an educator and there are 55 counties and in 37 of those and more in the future according to the new gal, they work together to provide resources on a local level. They get information from our department and other agencies and then share them more one-on-one than we can do sometimes. They have an annual conference and Annette and I go to that conference and share information when new books and articles come out, it also goes on to our listserv were about deaf-blindness, multiple disabilities, or other things that are advantageous to parents. We had a strong collaboration in the past and looking forward to some of the new things we will have going on in the future. >> The parent training and information, we had not had a real strong relationship with them in the past frankly. Now we have a new director in the state and she came to our advisory in September and loved hearing what we were doing and said, let's get together and do something and Annette and I said yes, when are you coming to Charleston? Three weeks ago Brenda came to Charleston and we literally went to a small library and pulled chairs into a circle and we invited Nancy as well the PERC person , and so there were the five of us and a couple other people who wanted to meet her. We sat down and talked about which projects that we all do and possibilities for the future. It was a very refreshing, delightful afternoon. Just thinking about how we can begin to collaborate. We want to get her four regional trainers and provide information to various locations in the state. We are just beginning to get going. I don't know what the problem was in the past. I'm not sure, we had tried repeatedly and had a couple of things happen that didn't work out so well. Anyway, that is passed an history and we are moving forward. I think the three of us together, the PERC, PTIN SenseAbilities have awesome things to look forward too soon. >> So the shared activities that we participate in, with the PERC we have Camp Gizmo when Megan and Peggy asked that we write something about shared activities, we focused on how we have Camp Gizmo that serves the needs of kids with multiple disabilities from birth to age 8. Several of the kids are in the deaf-blind centers send it focuses on assistive technology. There are 650 people who attended many graduate-level students and physical therapy, speech language and pathology and other disciplines coming to this. It's amazing and has been going on for about 18 years. PERC and SenseAbilities is an integral part of helping the families gather information. We have a family learning weekend for SenseAbilities and the person comes and doesn't do anything formal at the family weekend, but they are very busy. Our parents like to have meals with them or have time dedicated in the evening to talk about things like IEPs and age of majority, guardianship, and all those different things that the PERC person can't really help with. We do multiple trainings together and said on one another's boards. There are all kinds of things we do together to share in support of kids that have sensory loss and multiple needs. Also when there is a call into our department and there is something that involves sensory issues than the PERC coordinator will call and say a parent has a question and do my answering it right or are there things I am missing? What other supports can we give them? On the PTI side, the PTI director sits on our advisory board which is what happened this fall when we met our new gal. We share resources and will be doing more of that in the future. There are numerous trainings and information available to parents and families that we haven't used as much in the past but I see a change in that and looking forward to it. We had a recent meeting and we plan to get up to her area of the state and meet the folks she works with. >> Rethinking it, we have the new PDI director, Brenda Lamkin who was on with us today, and we set up that meeting and will continue to talk. What we took from the past was if it was working well we will save it, fresh ideas are to have shared table and Celebrating Connections which was an early intervention conference held last week for more than 1000 people. And PTIN SenseAbilities had a table for pertinent information. We will keep talking and we are good at that. Stop and clap. We will meet the other folks in one of the ideas from our PERC gal was to have a stranded at a large statewide conference that works around some of the parent support. That is what we have for the future. >> This is how we look and these are the contacts for each of the projects. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Ruth Ann. Does anyone have questions? I was watching the chat pod and I see you were all typing. Does anyone have questions? That's a good sign. You can also use the raise hand feature, Star 6, or put something in the chat pod if you have questions so I will wait a second. I love this, good job Ruth Ann. And that we will move on with Lori and Sue Ann in Pennsylvania. >> The names under our pictures are misleading because I am Sue Ann. >> And I am Lori. >> That was not a trick and there will not be a test. Like West Virginia, Pennsylvania deaf-blind project grant is under the Department of Education. I have to use a few of the slides here that our -- that are our given intro slides. Because of where the grant is housed we follow them mission of the Bureau of education and the goal is to move towards building local capacity to support families and children. We know that's not always a possibility to build that local capacity. That is what we are here for. Under the Pennsylvania Department of Education we certainly do support every child being educated in their environment. >> With that said, what we have done is work with PEAL which is the Pennsylvania act of -- advocacy and leadership and the director of that Liz Healy is on the family engagement T WIG that is on NCDB and we are blessed to have Lori with us as part of our deaf-blind project on the advisory committee and for collaboration. Typically and historically the structure I said in is focused more on educators and family and then PEAL focuses more on -- >> Families and then educators. >> That's why we think it's the perfect balance. We can help address areas where one of us is not strong and the other has resources or ideas and we are not incredibly well known with each other but we're always figuring out how we can best collaborate. That's what we want to share with you all. One of the pieces that makes PEAL so we effect give with the deaf-blind group is it can be just about children with deaf-blindness and in the sea of disabilities everybody deserves help and support, and any family who has a child with that disability and the PaTTAN we support kindergarten through 12th grade and then the deaf-blind were close earlier and starts at birth. We are talking across lots of funding streams and it's the collaboration that works and we will tell you why. >> Just a little bit about where the grant is housed. In our system under PaTTAN the state is broken up into three regional service centers . The colors on the map indicate which region and how large it is and it's done by population. In the yellow Pittsburgh area in the western part of the state which happens to be where both of our family consultants of the school-age group live, Molly and Patty. We're constantly trying to pull them over into the other parts of the state. We cover the whole state and it is 500 school districts and 57 counties. We have 29 intermediate units which are the equivalent of New York regional educational center so we network effectively with the intermediary units to's provide support statewide. >> For the project staff and initiative, a little confusing sometimes because the grant is embedded in the statewide initiative work. Across our state, we listed the folks who are part of this work. We have family consultants both in school-age an early intervention. We have an educational consultant and in early intervention I am the school-age lead and you see we have consultants at the East, Central, and Western regions focused on deaf-blind initiative in addition to some other areas. >> When we vote our grant, one of the things we tried to embed across the work and we have to constantly bring it back to the front of our minds because educators and families, so we want to keep bringing the family peace to the forefront. Our goal is to have engaged and supported families from early intervention all the way to secondary transition. >> As you all know we are OSEP funded and we have six grant schools that we are accomplishing. The third goal is to support families who have children with deaf-blindness and included in the goal is a specific piece around collaboration with our PTI. >> When we are looking at if we are successful and what can we do better, we have an advisory committee. They are informing us and giving us feedback on different products, on the process, and Lori sits on the advisory committee and we want to make sure we had a PEAL representative with us. Until recently Molly Black was on the board of PEAL for a long time and I know that will be coming around again where we both have representation but we are both taking turns now. We also solicited the [ Indiscernible ] of an external evaluator to help look to see what we're doing and best achieve grand goals. >> That brings us to PEAL. >> PEAL is the PTIN Pennsylvania, the Parent Training and Information center and we are under the direction of Liz Healy the direct -- executive director. We have two offices in Pennsylvania. One in Pittsburgh and one in Philadelphia. We have staff throughout the state that help families anywhere. There are two community parent resources as you see on the slide. One is mission MPower and that focuses on theory Pennsylvania -- Clara does Erie, and then the other one is Hispanos Unidos Para Ninos Excepcionales and they serve families, Spanish-speaking families in Philadelphia. So PEAL assist parents with children through the age of 26, children with disabilities, children with special health care needs . >> I'm sorry to barge in and this is Peggy but I can't hear you very well. Can you speak up please? >> I'm sorry. Is that better? >> Much better. >> The PEAL center serves and assist parents children through the age of 26, children with disabilities and special health care needs. We assist professionals and educators as well as gathering resources so they are informed about topics that are related to families and children with disabilities. PEAL is really a group of parents who have children with disabilities themselves will provide information and resources to children or parents of children and give them the needed support that they can be informed and make the best decisions for their families. Each family's needs are different so we want to make sure they have the information so they can support their family and give an open mind to different options and not just one-size-fits-all. >> One of the big things that the PEAL Center does is we have PEAL parent advisors . They are very talented and on the front line talking to parents every day throughout the phase. Whether it's about education, developmental needs, medical issues, etc. they are on the front line and can help families and education in the community to transition and even help with employment. >> We offer training and information and there is a lot on inclusion. We work with parents of children who were in congregate care and maybe homeschooled. We also work with students in transition, ES why -- ESY and we talk about the historical significance of parents and education and medical needs that are come to fruition through parents and what they have accomplished. We go back and look at the historical significance and also the future. Looking at leadership skills of parents and where do we go from here and what do we need to do? We do a lot of training which can be done face to face, online, and we have an annual conference that people attended. There are many ways to interact and I urge you to visit our website to look at the different things that we have. We have a lot of webinars that are archived that you can turn back to to get information. So we should tie this all to gather. >> Sounds like a good plan. >> The benefits of our collaboration which is why we are really here. One of the things we do well is the current needs and their families, what we have done is come to each other's conferences and family learning conference. I know I was privy to those last year, and we find out what the polls is of families who have children that are deaf-blind. I felt I was really getting a pulse of what's going on. As a PTI, are we missing anything that they are experiencing but we are not addressing? I feel that's very important to be available to families, and often times they may be isolated and not aware of that. We also do services and resources for each other on our websites. We collaborate and exchange captioning with some of our videos we have so they are accessible. >> We are part of the multistate collaborative on [ Indiscernible ] transition, the ITT I and wonderful the York has been the horsepower behind that and pulling it together. When we got to specific information about graduation requirements, New York looked great but didn't fit what Pennsylvania had. We were able to find something already put together on PEAL website but it wasn't captioned. Hopefully we will target certain materials will benefit in the near future and then broaden it as we progress through learning more about what each other's resources are. >> The other thing that came out of the collaboration was it created other referral forms. The parent advisor at PEAL is so important because they are on the front line and we don't want families to fall through the cracks. It so easy to do that. We ask our parent advisors if they have a family that has special needs through the death line -- deaf-blind project, write that down and give the information to staff so they can assist more thoroughly. Something that we do is cross over and I work on a project called [ Indiscernible ] which focuses on students who have complex instructional needs. It may not really express what they know were are able to do. I think that collaboration and crossover you can see with that project. A lot of students would be part of that project. >> The challenges are of course every collaboration has them, and one thing when we were discussing this is both organizations are very robust and producers of things. So stop the presses and we can slow down enough to see how to best collaborate and then the distance piece. Everything is done at a distance. Not being in the same room sometimes feels like a deterrent from collaboration but technology help with that. Also the nuances of funding sources and vocabulary that comes with each one. For example PEAL might grow around the world -- >> Advocate. >> And we will talk about adequacy -- Eric of the sea -- advocacy. >> Lastly one of the things we wanted to say as we had fun putting this together and we identify what each of us are good at and the other doesn't have to re-create the we'll. The family engagement piece, we have teams of intervenors going on on the project side. We see if there are families if we can support them on the PEAL side to see where we can do cross-pollination with what each of us do best. >> We found out we were using family experiences with advising and with period leadership to see where we could go from here. >> That is our peace from Pennsylvania and we were supposed to use the slide and not the other one. I forgot to take that out. That is our contact information if anybody wants to follow up with us. That's it for Pennsylvania. >> Thank you and I appreciate it. Does anyone have questions for these two about Pennsylvania? >> Looks like you did and. At -- last but not least Godfrey and Clara. You are in charge now. >> I just took myself off mute I am Clara Berg and I just recently retired from my collaborative we received a grant in 2008 and we are [ Indiscernible ] and it's funny to have to talk in the past when I still feel I'm still part of it. One thing we planned when we got the grant in 2008 is how do we involve families and help families to become leaders in the lives of their children. We decided the way to do it is to create parent leadership training in parts of the state and New York is a very large state and there are many different areas and pockets of population in our state. >> I am here with Godfrey Rivera who is my partner in crime today when we started with NYDBC we were partnering with the New York parent network which is the parent Association in New York which has a new name now which is the New York parent Association for deaf-blind. That partnership has existed pretty much since 1986 or 1987 when the parent network came to life. The projects I work with we have very strong partnerships within that network. >> Then we created a very strong partnership with the national Center for deaf-blind within NCDB because we were following many of the initiatives they were doing and we were partnering in many of those issues. Our main concern was how to better serve families in New York. In New York we have five PGAs and they are all in the [ Indiscernible ]. Pretty much the same population but we decided to try because I have experienced in the past working with >>> In the rural areas and not the Metropolitan areas. The relationship was always for one single event. We would do some training or something together and then each one would work separate. We went to create a model that maybe we can do a pilot model and then continue every year doing the same thing. >> I contacted the people in Rochester which is the Advocacy Center in Rochester and met and amazing lady named Kathy and when you establish a relationship and you know something will work because Kathy and I we clicked right away. It was just wonderful to integrate what she has through her resources into what we had discussed as leadership for that area. >> And then Godfrey representing the Sinergia Metropolitan center came into play when we did the training here in New York. I'm just giving you a little bit of the history because not everybody came at the same time. There were different partnerships that were coming as needed but then we established a strong relationship and that's what helped us create the successful training. >> We not only will were working very well collaborating through NCDB but the different agencies started also had different types of connections to work together which was wonderful. >> Just to give you a little overview on the example that worked so well for New York was we did this first one which was the pilot series in Rochester. That we brought from them at that time we had the lady who I refer to before who brought in and amazing way of teaching families on how to tell the story. It works so well then that we said for the next one, whenever we have the second session, we will do it with them. We did the series 2 and went to a different location in the state and we covered White Plains and Long Island. We used everything we had done on the first one, but we also brought in the Rochester representative to do our second session. That we did one session for the metropolitan area. This one was really big because it's a very large concentration parents with kids in deaf-blindness in the metropolitan area of New York. The attendance was much bigger than in though first and second series. It was also a little bit more challenging because there are more people, and to provide the right material you need. The first three works so well that I then chose to do number four, but to this time it was to serve the population and Spanish. What I realized when we were doing the third series on the parent leadership training was it was almost impossible to invite families who spoke Spanish because you miss a lot in the translation. A lot of the topics we did during the training were sensitive topics and sometimes very hard to translate. I translated the material which I had already and we adapted the whole curriculum and did it very different. Instead of doing three weekends which I will explain in the next slide, we just did weekends every other weekend. We had one full day every other weekend. We needed to accommodate for the population we were serving at they could just not be away from their homes at that frequency. There was a virtual meeting where we invited people from all over the state to have sessions on webinars. That was very interesting. We had one in person meeting because the value when we talk about collaboration and partnership, the value of working together and thank God for technology and virtual access that we have today, but there is nothing that is more valuable as than putting people together in the same room and sharing things. The webinars worked okay, but it was much more rewarding when we were meeting in person. >> I wanted to give you an idea of how we ran the pilot program. The one we did in Rochester, the idea was to do three weekends from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon, but during the period of six months. In between the meetings, the families had homework. They had a lot of reading to do, we had conference calls, and they had assignments they had to complete. So coming into the second weekend, we would review the material of what they had done, answer any questions that were not answered those previous meetings brought up that could not be answered over the phone or through email, and the second weekend we had telling your story. You think telling your story is just a one session thing but the way we did it was very interesting and it was like having our families exercise the power of being families. That second weekend as part of the training was one of the more inspiring ones because of the power of each of the stories of the families. The third weekend we did training on conflict resolution. We had an action plan for the future. I don't have a schedule because like I told Megan, if I have to describe POC it would take me two hours and we only had 20 minutes to try to accomplish that. On the first weekend we had families work on planning alternatives where they would talk about the family, child, and community and then we would move six months later after they learned to do [ Indiscernible ]. >> I just want to reinforce a point that Clara made because it's important. The piece about telling your story is so important and so powerful. First of all, when you sit with a group of people you don't know well yet at the beginning of the series, telling a story is a good way to connect to other people who may share similar issues and concerns you have. More importantly, the fact that we want parents to be able to describe their challenges, their needs, their hopes, aspirations in a way that makes sense to others. Most importantly to school personnel. At our parent center, we have parents practice expressing their needs, their hopes, their challenges, in a way that is concise and precise so they can convey important information to school personnel, other members of the ITT. We want the conversation to be productive and meaningful. And when Clara first contacted me to see if we could set up a collaboration, I am all about collaboration since day one and I said sure. That led to the facility and the first training was on a very cold day in January. And they showed up, and when I saw that I said these people are with it. They have the wherewithal and the passion to come so of course we will make it as friendly and accessible as possible to them. We set out to do that and Clara and the rest of the team was great . The relationships developed rather quickly and support connections and groups developed very quickly. The PTI connection was about giving information about their rights under IDA and also information about what services and programs were available using the New York City Department of Education special education unit. It was a wonderful and powerful experience that I really enjoyed. >> Why did it work? I think I establish some of the reasons why it worked. Communication, the fact we're on the same page, we didn't have to reinvent the wheel, we saw a need and came up with ways and strategies to meet them. And Clara refer to the training curriculum and when I got a copy of that I said, what a powerful document and I can't believe Clara translated into Spanish but she did. One of the big issues was how to make the information accessible to Spanish-speaking parents who had children who were deaf-blind. Of course we had to be involved and understand the ideas and concepts and once again to express to school personnel what the needs are and how to become a team player and member. All types of expertise were engaged. We didn't have to go through a process to find out what do we do and how to we become a meaningful member of the collaboration because it was almost intuitive. It was unusual but we didn't have to go through a lot of effort finding out of defining our territory. It wasn't necessary and something that just happened and was really nice. >> If I may add to what you just said also, when we went to Rochester we asked at the Advocacy Center we could use their space and they said yes. The same thing happen in New York when I called Godfrey and said I want to do it he said my house is your house. You can do it any our offices so the sharing not only common goals and ideals but the real sharing of resources in the sense of using each other's spaces and everything that we needed. >> This is Megan and there is a comment in the chat box wondering how the Spanish version was different than the other ones that you did, the presentation? >> Can you go back to the pictures? It was different because I was sending of valuations to see the results on the first two and everything went wonderful. When I was talking to some of our [ Indiscernible ] and I said I need you for a weekend to do training and they would say I can't come for a weekend, I can either, on a Saturday or Sunday and my husband will stay with the kids etc. the education and changes have to be instead of having all the materials provided in two weekends I had to do all the topics, pretty much one topic per weekend. It's hard because it was a whole different layout in the sense of you can talk about conflict resolution, but it's not a session you just do and two hours and is finished. We would start conflict resolution on a Friday night and then you sleep on the ideas and come in the morning and bring issues or create some kind of stories we could do role modeling. When you do a session for five or six hours, there is not also much time for the participants to come out with fresh ideas. The whole concept of doing it in Spanish was intense and adapted for the family's needs. I felt it was very important to really satisfied and write all the information that they needed at that time. Godfrey was a big help of course because he also speaks Spanish. He was a very strong player when I did it in Spanish. I don't know if that answers your question. >> I would like to add that a few years ago OSEP tasked all the parent centers to develop language access plans. We do work with diverse populations throughout the country, and the information that we conveyed to parents and other individuals has to be as Clara mentioned culturally and linguistically appropriate so they understand what the material is, the ideas are, and are able to therefore internalize them. It helps develop ideas and perspectives that will help them become effective advocates for their children. >> Did that answer the question? >> Yes. There is one more. We have a question from Wisconsin asking if you have a cost estimate for the training series and did you share costs between East -- each agency and have you done of valuations months after the training on the outcomes of a? >> Of those absolutely. It's a must when you work on a federal project. We did a valuations over this period on each of the long weekends. We had an evaluation at that particular time each weekend and then we gave generic evaluations involving all three weekends which is the completion of the program when the parents got their certificates same-day had completed the series. They also gave us an evaluation. We also gave a valuations with the Spanish-speaking families and we did a valuations on the webinar series. All the materials available. I have copies of everything. I think I sent Megan copies of the agendas that we did. If anybody needs anything, it is definitely available. >> Great. Thank you Clara. >> Robbin, if you don't mind going to slide number 12 please. We were asked why was it so important for us to do this to gather and we call these the key elements to the partnership. As Godfrey said, with one phone call, pretty much we did not have formal agreements were signed contracts or anything like that. It was done pretty much in formally. Just by saying hello on the phone and a handshake, we knew we would be working together. Y? Because we had shared values on serving families and we had the passion to help. It was quick to buy in because as soon as we expressed what we wanted to do with the families, they said absolutely. We believe in this and we would like to collaborate. There was a lot of sharing of information and also exchange of information in the sense of what do you think about this or that, so there was a lot of exchange -- exchanging of resources. We all adapted to the needs of the different partnerships we had with the different projects. Most importantly, we were really listening and hearing each other. We created a very wonderful, very strong friendship among all the players with the parent leadership training. It was more than a formal agreement, but it's more than just OSEP asking us to do it. We did it because we enjoy working together. >> Godfrey, do you want to talk about this? >> You mentioned one of the issues was we all work under limited resources, we don't have enough resources to meet the needs so as you know leveraging is an idea that comes up. We are able to do that very successfully. For the PLT that Clara conducted in New York City, since we are located in the middle of Manhattan we have the bus, subway, and Metro access. We are easy to get to. Our building is located in an accessible location for the parents. Also when we had to photocopy the materials, we didn't have to go to Staples which is one of the companies that does that kind of thing in New York City's -- New York City. We use the facilities that we have here. We obtained food from the area. We have Internet access, audiovisual, so everything that was needed to make the training meaningful and productive were readily available. We didn't have to waste time, effort, or money coming up with solutions because of the settings that we had, those issues were not a problem. >> Godfrey and Clara we have about three minutes left until the captioner has to leave, so too >> Maybe we can jump to the conclusions. The conclusions are there is an abundance of materials available. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. When I put the materials together, I didn't do it myself. I pretty much got the material from all over and we adjusted it a little bit to our needs. The material is there and there is no need to create new materials. Just adapt everything that is available. Make the training cost efficient by exchanging expertise, present tours -- presenters, and local agencies. Everybody was willing to work with us. Trust is an important component in every partnership. We trust each other very much. Adapt the training curriculum to meet the needs of the families which is what we did to serve different populations. And no one particular model fits all of the families, so according to the area, if it was metropolitan or plural, we had to do it. And something very important is if you don't have fun doing something, don't do it. We had a lot of fun putting all these materials together and doing the presentations. >> If we had time we were going to talk about success stories but we don't so we are open for questions now if anyone has anything that need Godfrey your myself to answer we are available. >> I would like to say thank you for sharing everybody here today, it was really helpful to hear all your different stories and share them with the network so people can think about how they want to partner and increase the levels of collaboration with their PGAs and state defined projects -- state deaf-blind projects. There will be a second webinar with more state sharing on Wednesday, May 25 at 12:00 Pacific Time in Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, in New Jersey will be presenting. Please come and join us for that as well. If folks have questions I'm sure we can help Clara into coming in joining the next one if they have residual questions they can email Clara and Godfrey is follow-up . But this was really great and thank you everybody. >> Thank you. >> Goodbye everyone. >> Have a great day everyone. >> If you could hit whether or not you loved it that would be great. Thank you. Just a quick polling question. [ Event concluded ]