Back to School & Tuesday Tips Webinars

Rhonda: Hey guys, it’s Rhonda with Kentucky SPIN. I just wanted to hop on here and just tell you about a couple of things. First we’re all getting ready for back to school and what that’ll look like this come, what’s scheduled now is the third week of August, maybe different than what we think it is going to look like. And so I wanted to take an opportunity just to talk to you a few minutes about maybe some tips of, you know, making sure that we start back to school the best that we can, because we know it’s going to vary. First of all, number one tip is if you have not heard from your school and know what the options are, what they’re going to be doing, whether you may receive a phone, call a letter, but if you’ve not received anything or any communication, please reach out to your school. See what the options, because not every school district in Kentucky, is going to be rolling out in the same way. So there’s been a lot of guidance and we’ve done webinars, I’m going to tell you in a minute the other thing, about our Tuesday Tips webinars that will be going on, but regardless when school does start back, and as we know right now, as far as I’m aware, all districts have went by what the governor had suggested, not going back until the third week of August. Now that’s, as of now. what’s going to be critical is you need to contact your school and start communicating with them right now, so that you know are there options available? How is school going to start back within your district? Regardless if your child has a disability or not, then you’re going to be able to know the next steps that you need to take and working with everyone. And if there are options that are available within your district, you are going to know then to make the best decision for your child. And then also then you’ll be able to look at, especially for children who have disabilities and IEPs and 504 plans, Okay. Now that I’ve made this choice, how do we then work from there given your child’s IEP or 504 plan. So first please reach out to your school by email, phone in person, I know that the schools are open with administrators there and they probably had to be varying times that people were in the office because of the social distancing. But the administrators are working and the teachers are probably already working. So contact them and find that out. Another thing too that I wanted to talk about is, we’re going to be having, I know that you all have been used to, especially when COVID hit, we have the Tuesday, the 11:00 AM Eastern time to 12:00 PM Eastern time, the COVID webinar updates we were doing weekly. And then we had moved them to on an as needed basis as guidance has rolled out. We started them back up this week, which is, you know, the first week of August. My [chuckles] months and days, I don’t know if y’all are like me, but have all been running and together. So based on some specific guidance that the Kentucky Department of Education had put out specifically related for children with disabilities. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to have a standing Tuesday Tips webinar, and it could be for an hour or two hours, depending on the topic. Right now what they’re going to be, is related to COVID. And also too, during that time, if there are any other important updates, whether it be about COVID or important information for families, children, adults with disabilities, we will make sure we share that on them. So you can always check our website. This coming week, which will be next Tuesday and my dates. So it would be the second week of August [chuckles], the Tuesday, we’re going to concentrate on the compensatory education and ESY. And take it a little more in depth, because we had such a short window of time and your all’s great suggestions from the webinar, so that we could spend more time just on that and concentrate on the c compensator education, and ESY, extended school year, which is related to KDE IEP, the guidance document that was released for districts and everyone. So please join us, check our website. Also on social media, we will be posting, and don’t forget we record those and if you’re not able to make it, and we also don’t, let me forget to tell you, we also have a standing Thursday webinar too, and we already have those scheduled through August. We’re working on the September ones. That’ll be up on our website and those are on various topics as well. Please know if you can’t make it for those, that they are being recorded. And we, have been turning things around in record time, getting them closed captioned on our YouTube and on our website. So follow our YouTube channel. We’ll post them on other social media, and have those closed captions. So you still will have access to those if you can’t join them live. But please stay safe. We love you all. And we are here to help and we are going to get through this together. Because if I know one thing for sure is, we are resilient and we are survivors and we’re going to work together to make the best future for our children, regardless of what’s going on. But love to you all and we’ll talk soon. Okay. Bye. Bye.