AASR Live

Please join us for “When 'Doing Well' Is a Warning Sign: The Cost of Holding It Together at School” with Courtney Hart.

Courtney Hart, LCSW-C, is the founder of Healing Hart Wellness, where she specializes in supporting ADHDers and Autistic people through evaluations, parent consultation, and therapy. Courtney also writes two newsletters on Substack: one focused on supporting parents and helping professionals understand the impacts of advancing technology and the other on high-masking neurodivergence. When Courtney isn’t working, you can find her starting random projects at home, playing fetch with her dogs, scouring the internet to research topics of interest, and actively working on local political change as a Board Member of Maryland Forward Party.

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Please join us for “Providing Neurodiversity-Affirming Support: A Relational Neuroscience-Informed Child and Youth Care Perspective” with Nancy Marshall. 

Nancy Marshall (she/her) (PhD, MA CYC, RSW) is a Child and Youth Care (CYC) practitioner, a registered social worker (RSW), an educational consultant, and a part-time instructor in the Faculty of Education at York University teaching Disability and Inclusion in Education. Nancy recently launched AffirmAbility in Practice - a small private practice in Toronto providing neurodiversity-affirming training to schools and organizations, and therapy services to children, youth, and families. She has over 20 years of experience supporting neurodivergent young people in schools, group homes, and therapeutic settings. Nancy has lived experience as a neurodivergent adult with ADHD, and is a loving auntie to autistic and neurodivergent nieces and nephews. She believes that autistic-centered, neuroscience-aligned, and relational approaches offer the best support for autistic individuals.

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Please join us for “Understanding the Impact of Restraint and Seclusion: A Parent Panel Discussion.”

Chantelle Hyde
Chantelle’s advocacy began with her desire to support families after learning that her daughter was locked in a room at school. She has appeared on Global News and CTV W5, sharing her family's journey. With a background in adult education, business, and Self-Reg Foundations, she is working with politicians and top provincial advocates to bring the issues and alternatives to seclusion and restraint to public light. Chantelle hopes to bring positive change to systems across Canada.

Courtney Litzinger
Courtney is the Project Manager for AASR. She earned her BA in Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. She has spent over 15 years dedicating her professional life to the human services field, working with individuals with both intellectual and physical disabilities. She is the mother of 3 amazing children, the oldest of whom is Autistic. Her goal is to support the removal of barriers for families in their communities.

Melissa Custer
Melissa is a stay-at-home mother of two amazing neurodivergent boys. She has a BS in Psychology from UWGB and is a member of her school district’s SEPAC. She currently homeschools her older son and is a Pharmacy Tech on weekends. She found out she was neurodivergent herself at age 40. After all the difficulties with her older son’s education, it opened her eyes to the need to further educate herself and advocate for her family. She attended the WI Family Leadership Institute in 2024 and is now committed to being a fierce advocate for change.

Sarah Johnston-Waugh
Sarah is a bookkeeper and a mom of 5. When her youngest, who is 9 and autistic, was repeatedly restrained in his special education program, she decided to learn as much as possible about ways to prevent this from continuing to happen in our school system. Sarah is a firm believer in Dr. Ross Greene’s work and hopes to see a change towards a more collaborative approach in the classrooms in our future.

Cassie Atallah
Cassie Atallah is a Trauma-Informed Changemaker with 10 years of teaching experience and 12 years of experience parenting her gifted, autistic son, who has become her greatest teacher. She has dedicated much of her time to learning about healthy, equitable approaches to extreme behavior. She shares this knowledge in her work as the co-founder and co-leader of EndSaR-MI and EndSaR-NJ, two organizations dedicated to creating safe schools without seclusion and restraint by finding creative ways to meet student needs in order to prevent meltdowns. She also creates content and offers coaching and training through inueri insight.

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Please join us for “Facing the Fantasy, Finding the Way Forward: A New Book from Doris and Rick Bowman.”

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.

They are now in the final stages of preparing to release their first book, titled after their current workshop – “Your FBA is a Fantasy! A Guide to Making Trauma-Informed, Neuro-Affirming Practices Actionable, and Aligning our FBAs and Behavior Plans Accordingly”.

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Join us for “What Social Psychology Says About Behaviorism, and Five Things to Try Instead” with Dr. Arielle Silverman.

In this presentation, Dr. Silverman will share research and theory from social psychology explaining why behaviorism (rewards and punishments) so often fails to improve children's long-term behavior. She will then discuss five strategies to use in place of behaviorist methods: co-regulation, communicating clearly and reasonably about behavioral expectations, proactively solving problems, building a child's self-regulation toolbox, and intentional role modeling.

Arielle is a disabled activist and a social scientist who is passionate about improving public understanding of life with disabilities.

Professionally, she has spent fifteen years conducting research on the social psychology of disability. Personally, she has spent a lifetime learning and teaching with fellow members of the disability community.

An excerpt from Just Human:
"The most important thing I have discovered as a leader, a supervisor, an educator, and even an aunt, is that respect must be given before it can be received. When we offer respect and compassion to our children, our students, our employees, and others under our authority, we can bring out their full potential. What we get back is not just compliance and cooperation, but a real, mutual, human connection."

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Please join us for “Fighting Ableism and Exclusionary Practices in Schools: A Conversation with Kara Dymond.”

 Kara Dymond, Ph.D., is a late-diagnosed autistic/ADHD advocate, teacher, researcher, and award-winning teacher educator from Toronto, Canada. Her work supporting autistic students inspired her books Creating a Neurodiversity-Affirming Classroom (2025) and The Autism Lens (2020). Kara researches accessibility in graduate teacher education and teaches graduate courses on Accessible Education & Classroom Neurodiversity at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, attempting to counteract the segregated and ableist ways in which education faculties teach about learner variability.

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Please join us for “Lighting Up the Learning Brain: An Interview with Jessica Sinarski.”

Jessica Sinarski, LPCMH is an award-winning author, dynamic speaker, and the founder of BraveBrains. She has spent her entire career working with children who have challenging behaviors and the caring adults in their lives. She loves spicy food, Diet Coke, and her sweet, silly family…not in that order.

Jessica has worked with thousands of teachers, counselors, and administrators to get to the root of problematic student (and staff) behavior. She translates neuroscience into action steps through comprehensive professional development, diverse books, and practical tools for the classroom and beyond. Learn more at www.BraveBrains.com.

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Please join us for “No Restraint: Disabled Children and Institutionalized Violence in America's Schools, an Interview with Dr. Charles Bell.”

Dr. Charles Bell is an award-winning associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice Sciences at Illinois State University. His research explores how out-of-school suspension, seclusion, and restraint impact families and teachers throughout the U.S. The Society for the Study of Social Problems selected Dr. Bell’s book Suspended: Punishment, Violence, and the Failure of School Safety as a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Book Award. Additionally, he has worked a subject matter expert on school punishment, violence, and public health projects with the Centers for Disease Control and the National Center for School Safety. His scholarship has been featured on NBC News, NPR, Detroit News, PBS, and in several international media outlets. Dr. Bell has also served as an expert witness in state and federal school punishment cases. New York University Press will publish his next book, No Restraint: Disabled Children and Institutionalized Violence in America’s Schools, in February 2026.

Purchase the book here: https://amzn.to/3YZbacf

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Please join us for “Building Neuroinclusive Spaces Where Every Child Belongs” with Lauren Hough Williams.

Lauren (she/her) is a neurodiversity and inclusion specialist and an experienced special educator and is the Executive Director of the Program for Neurodiversity and Inclusion, or “PINE.” PINE educates and empowers schools and communities to embrace neurodiversity, creating inclusive, accessible, and supportive spaces for children wherever they go. Her work centers on building neuro-inclusive spaces where every child belongs.

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Please join us for “Understanding Autism in Context: A Discussion with Dr. Peter Vermeulen.”

Peter Vermeulen, PhD, has a Master's in Psychology and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Leuven, Belgium (1985) and a PhD in Psychology and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands (2002). From 1987 until 1998, he worked for the Flemish Autism Association, first as a home trainer for families with a child with autism, later as director of the home training centre, and finally as a trainer/lecturer. Then, from 1998 till 2018, he was working as a senior autism consultant/lecturer/trainer at Autisme Centraal. He is the founder and director of ‘Autism in Context’.

He presents worldwide and has given keynote addresses at many international conferences, including the Autism Europe Congress, the World Autism Congress, the Asian Pacific Autism Conference, the National Autistic Society, and Scottish Autism.

He wrote over 150 articles on autism and is the author of more than 20 books on autism with translations into more than 10 languages, a.o. "This is the title: on autistic thinking” (2001), “I am Special: a handbook for psycho-education” (2000, revised edition 2013), “Autism as context blindness” (2012), a book that won several awards in the USA, “The predictive brain and autism” (2022), and “What really works with autistic children” (published in the USA in 2024). In 2019, he received the Passwerk Life Time Achievement Award for his more than 30 years of contribution to the autism community in Belgium.

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