Working with Key Adults in the Lives of System Involved Youth with Disabilities

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

When youth with disabilities are system-involved, there are many people looking to support the child in the best ways. Integrating that support and understanding how best to navigate the varying goals of each person involved in the child’s best interest can be an overwhelming. This workshop will introduce the different common stakeholders in the education team and how they can work together to improve outcomes for system involved youth with disabilities. You will also gain important insight and perspective on supporting both your and the youth’s journey of working with such a large team of educators and support people.

Learning Objectives

During this session, participants will:

● Learn how to identify and accommodate the unique expectations of people involved in disabled children’s educational and personal life

● Learn the challenges that different disabilities which affect children’s life development

● Develop strategies for designing and achieving supportive goals that meet the needs of disabled system involved children

Agenda 

9:00am-9:30am  Instructor and Group introduces selves and shares experiences working with disabled kids in the system

9:30am-10:15am  Teaching: Identifying titles, roles and affiliations of disability specific professionals in the family and educational lives of system involved youth

10:15am-10:45am  Discussion: Ways that disability impacts educational success

10:45am-11:15am  Break (CEUs will not be offered during this time)

11:15am-11:45am  Teaching: Understanding Legal mandates, rights and implementation timelines for multiple interventions

11:45am-12:15pm  Group Activity: Applying this learning to system involved youth with disabilities that you support.

12:15-12:45pm  Questions, Problem scenarios and getting support for system involved youth

12:45pm-1:00pm  Evaluations

Meet Our Trainer

“We can create together. We can heal together. We can mark the moments of ritual together. May the work of our hearts and hands speak together the truth of our lives.”

Shoshana has been working with communities and professional caregivers educating and training on the issues and challenges around progressive illness, trauma, death and bereavement for families for over 36 years. In that work she has supported people in many ways and forms as they experience illness, grief, healing, recovery, and transformation.

She began her grief and loss professional journey during the illness and death of both of her parents when she was a teenager. She subsequently served a residency in Berkeley to become an interfaith chaplain and now describes herself as “a Jewish chaplain, who works from an interfaith perspective”.

She has trained, counselled, and supported adults and children dealing with terminal illnesses, (and students/volunteers wanting to learn) using art modalities and non-traditional approaches

The thread that stitches together all the pieces of her work life is care, compassion and comfort for suffering people who find themselves outside the system of norms in American mainstream culture.

As a person who has lived outside those norms all her life, Mama Shoshana says with conviction, “We have our unconventional ways, and I am here to tell you that they are valid. There are many roads up this mountain called life, and we survive the unimaginable by stitching together all that we learn from one another.”

This course meets the qualifications for (3.5) BBS CEUs for LCSWs, LMFTs, LPCCs, and LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences & is provided by Fred Finch Youth Center, CAMFT Provider #045295.