CSS Toolkit: Resilience
Sandra Roberts, Education Consultant/CSS Field Colleague; Steve Garcia, Assistant Principal/CSS Field Colleague, South El Monte High School, CA

Resilience has been described as the ability to bounce back from challenging situations and events. Use of humor and connection with a caring adult are key. Using techniques that build the resilience of staff and provide interventions to use with students, build the staff's capacity to participate in transforming the climate of the school.

Strand: CSS Toolkit
Grade Level: K–12

Response to Intervention (RTI) & Comprehensive Student Support (CSS)
Jim Anderson, Intervention Team Coordinator, CSS Field Colleague, Health & Human Services, LAUSD, CA

Shining Star Schools are Comprehensive Student Support schools that scored well in this year's annual peer review of their application and showed significant gains in academic improvement by meeting their API and AYP targets.

While many schools have succeeded in meeting their overall API target goals, a large number of them are struggling in their efforts to achieve the same success across their significant subgroups, especially with English Language Learners. During this presentation, participants will learn about the strategies Dolland Elementary has implemented, which have resulted in impressive API gains for their ELL subgroup during the last four years.

Strand: Best Practices
Grade Level: 2-5

Response to Intervention (RTI) & Comprehensive Student Support (CSS)
Jim Anderson, Intervention Team Coordinator, CSS Field Colleague, Health & Human Services, LAUSD, CA

How will the new federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) legislation affect your CSS program? This session will cover the history behind the legislation, how other states are interpreting the law, and how California is making plans to implement it. This informative and exciting session is designed to help you better understand RTI philosophy and how you can use RTI to strengthen your CSS program.

Strand: Best Practices; Foster Youth; VetORC
Grade Level: K-6

Student Success Teams: A Link to RTI and Beyond
Andrew Stetkevich, Staff Development Specialist/CSS Field Colleague, Riverside Staff Development Center, CA; Vicki Butler, CSS Field Colleague, Director, Val Verde USD, CA

The presentation will provide participants with best practices in implementing Student Success Teams (SST) at their school sites. Participants will obtain ideas on how to integrate Response to Intervention (RTI) while maintaining the fidelity of the SST process. Participants will also network with other schools to share ideas on all elements of the SST process.

Strand: Best Practices; VetORC
Grade Level: K–12

Framework for Understanding Poverty
Ruby Payne, Ph.D., President, Author, Consultant, aha! Process, Inc., TX

This session will be a follow-up in-depth look at Dr. Payne's keynote.

Strand: Engaging At-Risk Students; VetORC
Grade Level: K–12

Improve Motor Skills, Accelerate Progress for ADHD and Other Learners
Cindy Roth Pahr, Founder, EduClime, CA

Today's students are struggling with motor skills. Find out what you can do about it! Many ADHD students' motor difficulties are misunderstood, resulting in negative school experiences and failure. Learn fun, effective strategies to help students with fine motor, gross motor, visual tracking and sensory skills. You can employ these strategies on Monday morning and have a repertoire of ideas to share with teachers who need assistance with students in these areas. Handwriting emphasized.

Strand: Engaging At-Risk Students
Grade Level: K–6

Paving the Way to Student Success: Increasing Your Odds with Reluctant Learners!
Cristal McGill, Ph.D., Education Consultant, ASU Faculty Associate, Teacher Education Programs, CO

Discover how to set the stage to motivate your students and get them charged up for learning. You will also leave with a tool to increase your students' accountability. This session is designed to renew your energy and excitement for teaching while building your repertoire of effective teaching moves in a fun, fast-paced environment. Participants will gain an increased understanding of practices that foster resiliency and mastery in children, youth, and families enduring the effects of multiple risk exposure. We will identify practices that positively alter the social climate of classrooms, which can lead to a reduction in aggressive and violent behavior.

Combining these techniques with teaching practices creates a blast of focused, productive energy, which propels groups quickly and easily towardsachieving the desired objectives. Come expecting to “play to win.”

Strand: NEW!, Engaging At-Risk Students
Grade Level: K–12

Rebels with Applause: Brain-Compatible Approaches for Motivating Reluctant Learners
Grace Dearborn, Educational Consultant, Conscious Teaching, LLC, CA

How do we address our “rebel” students who seem to have the hardest time paying attention and getting work done? This lively, fun, and interactive session will provide teachers and staff developers with dozens of practical brain-based strategies they can use to help get “rebel” students of varying abilities and learning styles involved and motivated, and help them retain more.

Strand: Engaging At-Risk Students
Grade Level: K–12

Enhance Parents' Spanish Literacy: Start a “Plaza Comunitaria”
Linda Coyne, Principal/Director, Community Education Center, Soledad USD, CA

Many of our Spanish-speaking parents did not finish school in their homeland. This workshop will show you how to start a program to assist parents in acquiring their elementary and secondary education certificates through a collaboration with the government of Mexico.

Strand: NEW!; Family and Community Collaboration; VetORC
Grade Level: K–12

Mission Possible: Making a Dream Come to Fruition
Christine L. Tippett, Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Marriage, Family Therapist, Sacramento, CA

Mission Possible is a School-Based Family Counseling Program operating on middle and high school campuses with high risk students, to facilitate their success academically, socially, behaviorally and emotionally as they progress through the developmental stage of identity discovery. The program brings interns from the University of San Francisco graduate program in Marriage and Family Therapy, under the supervision of a private practitioner and contracts with local school districts to provide mental health services. Participants will learn how to replicate this model in their area, with a lot of effort and little money.

Strand: NEW!, Family and Community; VetORC
Grade Level: K–12

Who Owns These Kids? A New Look at Connecting Middle School Students to Their School
Sue Kaiser, Principal, Sierra Vista Middle School, CA

This session will present the findings from this megastudy which was funded by the National Science Foundation. Focus will be on how to implement the recommendations revealed in this study. A systemic approach to raising achievement and connecting students to school will be shared.

This session will give special attention to the application of the powerful findings from this research. These simple yet profound ideas can be implemented by all schools to promote learning.

Strand: Increasing Academic Achievement
Grade Level: 6–8

“Power Five”–Habits that Change Behavior
Greg Solomon, Inst. Music Teacher, Vista Heights Middle School, CA

With just five simple habits, you will learn how to change the behavior of disruptive students in your classroom. Understand the power of care and how misbehavior is a good thing. Train yourself and your students to enjoy purposeful change. Teach to your expectations and give consequences for inappropriate behavior. Then step back and watch the learning begin.

Strand: NEW!, Instructional Strategies
Grade Level: K–12

Student Engagement Now
Ernest Mendes, Consultant/President, Mendes Training & Consulting, Inc., CA

This session will exemplify how to create anticipation, curiosity, enthusiasm, confidence, and cooperation in the classroom. Increase your own shortterm memory and learn how to open the gates to long-term memory recall! This brain-based training will teach participants how to deliver and differentiate instruction through four memory paths and four of the brain's natural learning systems.

Strand: Instructional Strategies
Grade Level: K–12

Is it Candy, or Drugs? Substance Abuse Awareness and Over-the-Counter Medicines
Phillip Hubbs, Executive Director, Proactive Network Against Substance Abuse, CA

Is it candy or is it drugs? What household products are abused? Why is the abuse of prescription drugs & OTC medicines on the rise with our teens? How easy is it to buy marijuana in your neighborhood? Come and learn to recognize the signs of drug use, as well as the physical effects, packaging, and slang terms of the latest drugs. This session is for parents, teachers, and administrators interested in the latest news, strategies, solutions, and resources in the fight against substance abuse.

Strand: NEW!; Safety and Violence Prevention; CASCWA; Juvenile Detention
Grade Level: K–12

Substance Abuse Prevention: A Win-Win for Districts, Students, and Families
John Miranda, Regional Coord. LifeSkills Training, Princeton Health Press, CA; Jim Crittenden, SDCOE Student Support Services, CA; Christina Boyd, TUPE Coord./Life Skills, SDUSD: Counseling and Guidance, CA; Pamela J. Werb, U of Min Medical School, Facility Department of Family Practice and Community Health, MN

Alcohol and other drug use results in predictable negative consequences for teens, the classroom, and districts–including absenteeism and related underachievement. Prevention and early intervention services are a cost-effective strategy to move the marker on test scores and improved school attendance.

Strand: NEW!, Safety and Violence Prevention; CASCWA; Foster Youth & Juvenile Detention; VetORC
Grade Level: K–12

Suicide Prevention Strategies–What Every Educator Should Know
Bob Burt, Outreach Coordinator, Riverside COE, Teen Line, CA

This presentation is extremely powerful and includes three content areas:
1. Understanding the causes, signs, and symptoms relating to at-risk students
2. Using outreach techniques that include all school stakeholders in suicide prevention awareness
3. Mandated reporting, education code issues, and resources that all attendees need to know. Also included are several true examples of the aftermath when educators fail to observe or report depressed and possibly suicidal children.

Strand: NEW!; Safety and Violence Prevention
Grade Level: K–12