Please join us for “Understanding Issues Impacting Black Neurodivergent Students” with Cheryl Poe.

Cheryl Poe is the founder and Executive Director of Advocating 4 Kids, Inc., a Special Education Advocacy organization that provides resources, information, and workshops to parents and professionals, with a special focus on addressing the needs of Black and Brown children with disabilities.

She is the past board president of the National Allies for Parents in Special Education NAPSE, a national parent-driven organization that works hard to increase access and quality advocacy resources for special education families from underserved populations to improve educational outcomes.

Mrs. Poe holds a Master of Arts Degree in Urban Education and Counseling. She also has completed over 15 credit hours of postgraduate hours in psychology. In June of 2004, she completed the Nation Group Psychotherapy Institute at the Washington School of Psychiatry in Washington D.C. in the study of Group Psychotherapy. Mrs. Poe completed a two-year term as the Student Outreach and Recruitment.

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Please join us for “Leading with the Heart with Jase Williams.”

Jase Williams is a TEDx Speaker who has 25 years of experience working as an educator and is the former Principal of Henry Hill School who won the prestigious Prime Minister’s Education Excellence Award - Wellbeing - the top education award in New Zealand. Jase is a certified trainer in the Neurosequential Model in Education (NME), and he is one of the leading voices in Relational Neuroscience & Trauma Informed Practice in Education and has shared his knowledge through an equity-focused, compassionate, and indigenous lens with thousands of educators

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Please join us for “Disruption in Schools: A New Book from Ben Sacco."

Ben is an education specialist and Author of ‘Disruption in Schools: Understand me before you mark me!’. He works with schools, teachers, and principals to tackle issues like teacher burnout, retention, school culture, and student behavior. Many of his strategies to improve behavior and classroom dynamics in schools are grounded in a deep understanding of neuroscience, child development, and psychology

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Please join us for “Collaborative Curiosity and the Unstuck Protocol: The Best Way to Prevent Restraint and Seclusion Is to Not Have a Reason to Even Consider It” with Jennie DunKley. 

As a special education consultant for over 25 years, Jennie has represented hundreds of families and attended over a thousand IEP meetings. She empowers Teams to focus unwaveringly on the actual and intended “I’s” in IEP – Individual and Inclusion. She offers expertise and training in navigating the culture, process, and the functional application of special education for all audiences. She is actively engaged with national and state policy development, including service as a member of COPAA’s Government Relations and Social & Racial Equity Committees, a family representative on the Massachusetts Special Education Advisory Panel, and as a core stakeholder in Massachusetts's IEP Improvement Project. A 14-year Board Member on the Special Needs Advocacy Network (SPaN), she founded the School Fair, Same Side of the Table forum, and co-founded the Family Grant and IEP Clinic programs. In 2012, Jennie designed and coordinated the implementation of a transition program for high-cognitive, post-12th-grade students with executive functioning and social communication challenges at the Ivy Street School.

Jennie's latest work, Collaborative Curiosity and the Unstuck Protocol, represents the culmination of insights gathered in her years as a special education consultant and from her prior career in crisis management, marketing, and communications. This reimagined practice is being delivered in multiple venues to advocacy, related-service, and parent groups, and as PD for school staff.

Most importantly, she is a Special Education Surrogate and a fiercely proud parent of a young adult on the autism spectrum, her co-presenter in Collaborative Curiosity, Sam DunKley

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Please join us for “Shifting the Narrative Starts with Parent Empowerment” with Stacy Badon and Torrin Kearns.

Stacy and Torrin Co-host a podcast that seeks to dispel the myths, misconceptions, and fears around Everything Autism. Stacy Badon is an Autism Education specialist, Sensory Enrichment Therapist, and Parent Coach, with previous experience as a Speech Therapist and Early Intervention teacher for public schools. She has 20+ years of professional experience supporting families in the Autism community, as well as global experience volunteering with nonprofit organizations. Torrin Kearns is an Autistic screenwriter, blogger, and neurodiversity advocate. Each episode takes a deep-dive into a different autism-related topic in a quest to provide answers, skills, and strategies for parents, caregivers, teachers, and therapists.

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Please join us for “Your FBA Is a Fantasy: A Discussion with Doris and Rick Bowman About Their New Book.”

Bringing together their combined experience and expertise in the fields of both mental health and education, Rick and Doris Bowman, affectionately known by schools and agencies around the country as “Team Bowman”, provide speaking, training, consultation, and coaching services to both educational organization and mental health agencies on topics of Trauma-Informed Practices/Care, Resilience Practices, Neuro-Affirming Practices, and approaches for intervening with youth with chronic challenging behavior of any cause.

Having lived through the opposite ends of what they view as the “trauma spectrum” in childhood, Rick and Doris bring not only their professional expertise but their lived experience to the work that they do – Rick having grown up in the “hot family” that was marked by violence and abuse as a result of his father’s own PTSD from serving 4 years fighting in the Philippines in WWII and his mother’s mental health diagnosis of schizophrenia, and Doris in the “cold family” where she experienced invalidation of feeling and emotion altogether and the trauma of having had 9 family friends (adults and children) murdered just down the street when she was 7 years old and her family never speaking about what had happened.

Rick & Doris’s credentials include the following:
• M.A. in Clinical Psychology (Rick)
• M.S., Education / Special Education (Doris)
• Advanced Certified Trauma & Resilience Practitioner – Education® (ACTRP-E®)
• Advanced Certified Trauma & Resilience Practitioner – Clinical (ACTRP-C®)
• Certified HeartMath® and “The Coherence Advantage®” Trainer
• Certified “The Resilient Heart” HeartMath Trauma Practitioner
• Certified “Stress & Well-Being Assessment®” Provider (HeartMath Institute)
• Certified Trainer “Collaborative Problem Solving®(Think:Kids, Massachusetts General Hospital)
• K-12 licensed school administrator in the state of Oregon
• PCI Certified Parent Coach®
• Certified special educator & administrator in the state of Oregon
Between them, Rick & Doris have held roles that include:
• Therapist
• Program Director
• Clinical Consultant
• Social Emotional Academic Learning Program Teacher
• Behavior Specialist
• Principal
• Assistant Principal
• Student Services Director

Rick & Doris have been former speakers at the Attachment & Trauma Network’s Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools Conferences since 2020, and are requested speakers at numerous national and state-wide administrator, educator and child-serving conferences, including special education, annual, and principal-specific conferences. They've been featured speakers at the Innovative Schools Summit's "Differently Wired" (trauma-informed) Conference, ESSDACK’s “Bridging to Resilience” Conference, Chaddock’s “Trauma-Informed Relationship-Focused Schools Conference”, and the Pacific NW Special Education & the Law Conference.

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Please join us for “Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education” with Alex Shevrin Venet.

Alex Shevrin Venet is an educator, author, and professional development facilitator based in Vermont. She teaches graduate teacher education at Vermont State University. Previously, she was a teacher and leader at an alternative therapeutic school, a community college instructor, and an after-school teacher in the upper elementary grades. Alex works with educators around the country to strengthen their trauma-informed education practices, with a focus on empowering teachers to create systemic change. She is the author of the bestselling book Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education, which has been integrated into teacher education programs in several states and has been cited in education research more than 200 times. Her follow-up book, Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Justice and Healing at School, provides teachers with the tools to implement trauma-informed practices starting where they are.

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Please join us for “Trauma, Healing, and Positive Identity with Dr. Karyn Harvey, PhD.”

Karyn Harvey has worked as a clinician in the field of intellectual disabilities for over 35 years. She has her Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Psychology from the University of Maryland. She has written three books: Positive Identity Development, Trauma–Informed Behavioral Interventions, and Trauma and Healing. She has a private practice and does therapy with people with intellectual disabilities. In addition, she regularly conducts training on trauma-informed support for people with IDD, trauma-informed leadership, and trauma-informed behavioral interventions for both state and individual organizations throughout the US and Canada. She sees restraints and seclusion as both traumatizing and re-traumatizing to the recipients and is passionate about the elimination of these procedures.

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Please join us for “Shifting from Retribution to Repair: A Discussion with Margaret Thorsborne.”

Margaret Thorsborne is an author, trainer, and facilitator of Restorative Practice with a background in education and counselling. She is a pioneer of Restorative Practice in schools in Australia and New Zealand in the mid-to-late 1990s, and in the UK in the early 2000s. She has since trained restorative practitioners and change makers in education, workplaces, community, police, and justice sectors across Australia, Asia, New Zealand, the UK, the USA, and Canada. She remains involved in this important transformation in schools, particularly around whole school implementation of trauma-informed, relational approaches and culture change. Marg has been awarded an Order of Australia medal for her contribution to education and a Lifetime Achievement award from NACRJ in the USA.

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Please join us for “Creating a Neurodiversity-Affirming Classroom: An Interview with Kara Dymond About Her New Book."

Kara Dymond, OCT, PhD, is a late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD advocate, teacher, author, researcher, and award-winning university lecturer. Kara teaches autistic elementary students who inspired her books, Creating a Neurodiversity-Affirming Classroom (Jessica Kingsley, 2025) and The Autism Lens (Pembroke, 2020). Kara earned the 2024 Award for Excellence in Initial Teacher Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where she teaches graduate courses on neurodiversity-affirming classrooms. In 2025, she received the King Charles III Coronation Medal, a Governor General Award for service, for her dedication to improving the lives of autistic people and their communities across Canada. She researches intersections of neoliberalism, ableism, racism, classism, and neuronormativity in education; teacher reflexivity; and the transformative potential of neurodiversity-affirming pedagogy, where all are expected and welcomed, and is a co-investigator in a study on Universal Design for Learning and accessibility in teacher education. For fun, Kara co-hosts a podcast called Autistic Tidbits & Tangents, along with autistic psychologist Maja Toudal and autistic composer Bruce Petherick.

From Creating a Neurodiversity-Affirming Classroom: The world expects the impossible from teachers, with so many young people in our care, all with unique needs. How do we help everyone to thrive?

Imagine a classroom where there is no 'normal' - where all brains are expected and welcomed. Students are taught about neurodiversity, metacognition, and self-advocacy alongside the curriculum and are encouraged to identify their own needs. Learning tools are taught and available to everyone!

This thoughtful guide breaks down the learning process. It's brimming with practical tips, brain-based strategies, and illustrative examples that teachers can implement in the classroom. Stories of real teachers and neurodivergent students help educators envision how to apply neurodiversity-affirming approaches.

This book invites a compassionate lens for teachers and students alike. It's the how-to of forging partnerships with students - our best resources in collaboratively problem-solving pressing classroom concerns and invisible learning needs. Everyone benefits when we plan with accessibility in mind!

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