I am so happy with the great turnout from our February meeting! Thanks to all of you for coming.
Here’s a quick recap of what we have coming up. The short version is that you spoke (remember those big Post Its?) and we listened!
March 18 Meeting
- Next Meeting will be held on Monday, March 18 at 6:30 p.m. at Heritage Elementary (same as the February meeting) in the commons. Heritage is located at 679 Lewis Center Road between Shanahan Middle School and Olentangy High School.
- Our special expert speaker is Lisa Perez with Ohio Parent Advocacy & Consulting, LLC. Lisa is a parent advocate (and an Olentangy parent!). Parent advocates do many, many things but are available to help parents through IEP meetings. If you have never heard of one and what they do then this will really interest you.
- With the April/May review of IEPs coming up for students, Lisa will review common IEP questions, some accommodations that may not work for an older student, how to advocate and dialogue on various things you can ask for in an IEP. We want you to be ready.
- As always, there will be time for questions! We know there will be many.
- This program is well suited for parents of students at any age. In other words, this is not just an elementary thing. In fact, this was identified by parents at all levels as a need at our last meeting so it will be helpful to everyone.
Future Meetings
- Future meetings will be held (when possible due to facility availability) on the third Wednesday of every month from here on out starting at 6:30 p.m. sharp.
- The location for a while will be somewhat TBD so stay tuned. However, we will try to book Heritage when we can since it is centrally located within the district and we have increased potential for gym usage for the kids.
Future Topics
- Wow! What great input you all had from the meeting. We took all the input from those big Post-It sheets and worked up a schedule. We also matched it against the natural schedule of IEPs and the school year.
- April 17 Meeting – Dr. Steven Guy, is a pediatric neuropsychologist in private practice in Columbus, Ohio. He works with children and adolescents with a wide variety of developmental and acquired conditions. He will talk about the difference between a clinical vs district diagnosis, how to work with executive functions, ADD overlap and much more.
- May Meeting – In the works! We are hoping to book a college accommodation expert from the University of Cincinnati. This one will have great appeal to middle and high school students, too. More later but stay tuned and keep your fingers crossed that we can pull this one off. (Date and Location TBD…having some difficulty booking a facility side.)
It’s messy but this was the start of our work in organizing and breaking down the topics of interest along with the natural IEP school year calendar. I like the “College guy” notation. That’s what we are working on for May. Fingers crossed.
Logo Contest
- We launched our logo contest with the kids at our last meeting! The purpose of this is to arrive a logo for our network that was designed by our kids. They can submit as many as they like.
- The artwork that will translate best will be that which takes up the entire page. In other words, make it big!
- Once we have a healthy sampling, we will give everyone a chance to vote (hopefully April or May).
- Attached here is the logo contest sheet. We will also have copies at the March meeting. Design away!
Olentangy Dyslexia Network 