Leadership EDIT 2025

Join this interactive session to define and develop your professional identity as a leader. Engage in self-reflection to discover what drives your practice and explore the concept of personal branding to create a professional persona that aligns with your values and goals. Learn practical strategies for expanding your leadership skills, including crafting a mission statement and creating a personalized action plan. Leave with a digital interactive notebook containing actionable steps to strengthen your impact within your school environment! * Attendees of this session will need to bring a laptop with them in order to full engage in learning activities* 

In 2024, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation revealed that Wichita Public Schools in Kansas inappropriately restrained and secluded students with disabilities, often for punitive reasons or non-compliance. The investigation led to a settlement agreement with the district to end the use of seclusion, reform its restraint practices, and improve services to students with disabilities.

This session, “Classroom Crisis: Reducing Restraint and Seclusion Through Proactive Leadership,” will explore the critical importance of addressing these practices and provide school leaders with strategies to reduce and eliminate physical restraint and seclusion.

Participants will learn:
1. The impact of restraint and seclusion on students
2. Trauma-informed alternatives to these practices
3. How to implement systemic changes in their schools

Participants will gain an understanding of trauma-informed, neuroscience-aligned, neurodiversity-affirming, relationship-driven, and collaborative approaches to proactively reduce and eliminate the use of physical restraint and seclusion in their schools and districts.

Participants will grade their current practices using a rubric assessment that follows the PTA's national standards for family-school partnerships; share and analyze their successes regarding family and community engagement strategies; share and analyze their toughest challenges regarding family and community engagement; and brainstorm ways to address the 6 standards of family-school partnerships: 1) Welcome All Families, 2) Communicate Effectively, 3) Support Student Success, 4) Speak Up for Every Child, 5) Share Power, 6) Collaborate with Community.
The facilitator will present best practices / examples of impactful efforts collected from administrators across the nation and task participants with tweaking and possibly applying these efforts to their own schools and districts.

In Beneath the Surface: Recognizing and Reaching Our Internalizing Students, we will take a deep dive into understanding and supporting students who struggle silently. Participants will explore why reaching internalizing students is critical (Reaching the Hidden Reefs), gain practical tools for identifying them (Navigating with the Right Tools), and develop strategies to create safe, supportive environments where they can thrive (Creating Safe Harbors). Through interactive discussions, real-world scenarios, and collaborative problem-solving, attendees will engage in meaningful conversations about the hidden struggles of these students. Reflection activities and takeaway resources will ensure that learning extends beyond the summit, empowering educators to implement strategies in their own schools. By fostering continued dialogue and action, this session will help shift the tide in supporting internalizing students effectively.

Advocating for your appropriate role is a significant part of any position or program. Many times we're reluctant to speak because of all of the "what if's". Advocacy doesn't need to be terrifying. Learn how to lean into the fear, finding an advocacy approach that benefits you, your program and students, while leaving you feeling empowered as an advocate. Let's find a way to break the mold with leadership, advocacy and collaboration.

Our schools, districts, and organizations are dynamic, living systems in which our experiences, thoughts, identities, behaviors, and feelings are constantly intersecting, colliding, avoiding, and yes, synching together as we navigate our collective nervous systems. This session dives into the role of leaders as we seek to create and honor the supportive and equitable school environments that allow all stakeholders to thrive. Through the lens of applied educational neuroscience, participants in this session will gain awareness of their own nervous system states and learn strategies to hold space and energy for the most vulnerable among us. When we shift paradigms and adopt compassionate, inclusive, and restorative practices, we begin to transcend the devastating effects of toxic stress, trauma, pain and fear that are so prevalent in today’s learning systems.