Welcome to the 2015-2016 school year! It has been an eventful summer but it is great to feel the excitement of educators and students returning to classrooms full of plans and optimism.

In this first newsletter of 2015-2016 we want to share with you some of the exciting plans we have at the Lower Hudson Regional Partnership Center for 2015-2016.

New Staff at the Lower Hudson Regional Partnership Center!

We are very excited to welcome David Luhman to the Lower Hudson Regional Partnership Center as a Special Education School Improvement Specialist (SESIS).  David will be joining school- and district-based teams in Southern Westchester to facilitate a quality improvement process designed to ensure academic and social-emotional success for students with disabilities.  He will be assisting schools with data analysis, goal setting, designing and implementing professional development plans, and monitoring the impact of those plans by  measuring progress towards achievement of student outcome goals.  Prior to joining the RSE-TASC David was both a teacher and an administrator in high school settings, therefore bringing a wealth of experience in secondary settings to our team.  He will be familiar to many in the Southern Westchester area from his work in Dobbs Ferry and Harrison school districts.  Welcome David!

We are also very excited to have Felecia Morris join our team as a Senior Office Assistant.  You will all soon be very familiar with Felecia as she will be taking over distribution of this newsletter and will be helping organize our workshops and responding to requests for information.  For the lucky winners of the RSE-TASC Year-End Survey raffle, it was Felecia who made sure that you received your prizes!  Welcome Felecia!

New Trainings at the Lower Hudson Regional Partnership Center!

We spent this past spring and summer reviewing workshop evaluations, responses to our year-end survey, and talking to educators in the field in order to identify what you feel you need to continue supporting the success of your students with disabilities.  As a result of that needs assessment, we are adding a number of new training series to our offerings.

In the area of leadership:

 The Path to School Improvement:  A Series for Administrators.  This series will focus on systemic approaches to school-wide improvement that results in better outcomes for all students, including students with disabilities.  We are starting the series on October 15th, with Judith Hochman presenting about her collaboration with a high school in Staten Island around implementation of a school-wide writing program.  Both the principal and Ms. Hochman, who was the Head of Windward School and the founder of the Windward Teacher Training Institute and is currently on the advisory board of Everyone Reads, will speak about the systems that were put in place and the remarkable impact on both student achievement and critical thinking skills.

In the area of CSE and IEP processes:

 Understanding Your Child’s Evaluation. This training, developed and delivered in collaboration with the Hudson Valley Special Education Parent Center, will help parents and guardians develop a better understanding of the evaluations that inform development of their child’s IEP.

Two-Day Institutes:  Developing Quality IEPs that Result in Educational Benefit and Creating and Monitoring Progress towards Meaningful IEP Goals. These new 2-day institutes will combine the content of some pf our previous trainings so that participants can really master new skills.

 Effective Instruction Across the Continuum and Eligibility Determinations for Students with Learning Disabilities. In the spring we will offer these two new vetted trainings from the New York Office of Special Education.

Special Education 101 for ESL Teachers. This training will help teachers of English as a Second Language better understand Special Education services and regulations.

In the area of transition planning and the CDOS Learning Standards:

  Work-Based Learning Series.  This new series of trainings will explore some of the ways that districts can provide work-based learning experiences for students working towards the CDOS Commencement credential.

Transition Assessments & Planning Series.  This series of three workshops will help district staff identify transition assessments and activities for students with disabilities who are college-bound, career-bound and/or have multiple disabilities.

In the area of instruction practices:

 Co-Teaching Team Series.  We will be offering our very popular institutes and trainings on explicit and specially designed instruction and literacy interventions, but will be including a strand of these trainings exclusively open to co-teaching teams.  Time will be built into these trainings for these teams to deepen their knowledge of the instructional practices discussed through application but also to plan how they will deliver instruction using these practices collaboratively.

 Explicit Instruction and Lesson Planning for Behavioral and Social Skills.  If you want to know more about how to apply the principles of explicit and specially designed instruction to teaching social-emotional and behavioral skills, attend this training.

Planning for Cultural Diversity.  As our communities become more and more diverse, our schools need to become more cultural responsive.  This training will explore ways of doing just that.

In the area of discipline and behavioral supports:

PBIS Tier 2 Study Group. This will be a facilitated study group in which participants read articles about evidence-based Tier 2 behavioral interventions that have proven to be effective for students with disabilities, and discuss implications and applications in their school settings.

Teaching Social & Behavioral Skills to Preschoolers and Developing & Monitoring Meaningful Behavioral Goals for Preschoolers.  As more and more attention is being focused on the level of expulsions and placement of preschoolers in more restrictive settings due to behavioral concerns, we need to focus more on measuring and monitoring preschoolers skills and directly teaching social skills.

And don’t worry! We are still offering our Oldies But Goodies!  See the RSE-TASC fall training calendar on page 2 of this newsletter.

Thanks to all of you for your support.  We look forward to continuing our collaborations with you this year!