- Good morning, all.
I am absolutely thrilled to be able
to be here today and to go through a conversation
with you all about how we can continue
to provide advocacy skills in our school communities.
And one of the things that I want
to kinda draw some attention to is
I purposefully use the term community versus environment.
Environment to me is a location, it's buildings,
and the community involves the people
that are around there, and for
our patients who are active in
our school communities, it's really the people
that we are going to effect change
and have interventional support with.
So just kinda think through that
as we're going through our slides today.
That's me.
So one of the things that we do
in education is we tell you what
we're gonna tell you, and then
we tell you, and then we kinda end
by telling you what we told you.
So this is my what we're gonna talk
about a little bit today.
These are your takeaways.
So when we're finished with our conversation today,
I really want you to have kind
of this burned into your brain a little bit.
The medical community is unbelievably complex.
Our school community is unbelievably complex.
The roles of an educational specialist,
or otherwise it's known as a school interventionist,
they're really varied.
They have a lot of different things
that they have expertise in, and have a
lot of different things that they promote supports
for our patients and our students.
Early intervention for our patients is critical,
and school intervention for our patients
when they become school age is critical as well.
We want to create awareness and
we want the information that gets
to the people who are providing those interventions.
So how do we do that?
What do we know?
So we navigate those complexities in the school
because it becomes advantageous for our patients.
We know that heart disease receives a
lot of intensities of medical treatment.
We know that the more intense the treatment is,
the greater the likelihood that
our kids will experience some impacts on their learning.
We also know that our patients are living longer,
they're living stronger, they're living healthier,
and they're returning to
their typical childhood communities,
which school is a component of,
and we know that our kids are entitled
to an appropriate school community
where they can do three things which are really important.
They can access their education,
they can participate in their education,
and they can make progress in their education.
Each one of those are different.
All three of them are required.
So how do we do that, in terms of an educational specialist?
We've got the medical community,
we have the school community,
and we have a bridge between them.
That bridge between
them is the educational specialist's role.
It's really the medical team.
You're well-versed in the intricacies
of care of our patients.
And due to advancements in exceptional care,
our patients are living longer,
and there's a whole group of people
who help our patients navigate their medical world.
I think we saw some slides talking about
all of the components that are important along the way.
There's also a whole group of people
in a school community that are helping patients
to navigate the school world.
So it's really a benefit for our patients
to be able to have someone bridge
what's happening medically, to translating
it to what can happen in that school setting.
The other part.
Aw, I don't know how that became Maize and Blue.
Sorry (laughs).
So that educational specialist's role is
really five main pieces.
This is who we are.
This is what we do.
We're a translator.
We're a synthesizer.
We're a publisher.
We're a coordinator.
And we're an educator.
This translator component's really important
because what it does is it translates
that medical information, that complex medical information,
that complex neuropsych assessment information,
into what I call school speak.
Those languages are not the same,
and it's really important for us
to be able to take that information
from the medical team, from our neuropsych development team,
and get it into school so that school understands
how that looks in their community.
This just describes it a little bit more in detail.
That synthesizer goes through and
it kinda organizes that information
into some meaningful products.
And that publisher gives information in multiple forms.
What we know is that people need
to have information in varying formats
and over lengthy periods of time.
This is where not
only the educational specialist can be helpful,
but also the educational specialist is a part
of the team for the long haul.
It is taking that information and being able
to provide that continuum of follow-up
that's really critically important
for our patients to be successful.
The other part is being a coordinator
and making those connections between the medical community
and the school communities, and then an educator,
providing good and relevant education
for parents, for families, for our patients,
for our school communities, and for
all the others that impact our children.
So a little bit of our targets
for an educational specialist,
or a little bit of our aims, you can tell I'm a teacher.
I keep looking up to see what my kids are seeing,
(chuckles) as opposed to looking here.
They always say never, ever put
anything up that you've not already seen.
So anyways, I keep peeking at it.
We provide access to really solid educational services,
and we provide support for the involvement
in communities, and that's really important.
A child's community in the school is not,
you may think, first of all, when you think school,
I'm not sure where your vision goes.
Maybe it's that third grade classroom you sat in.
Could be on the basketball court.
There's lots of different components
to that school community, so we want
to make sure that we provide the supports
and information so that good things can happen
in all of those school locations.
We also want to change and help be a catalyst
for looking at what the possibilities are,
and not what a patient's limitations are.
So what we really want to be careful
about is saying we know what we need to look at.
It's, how does that translate into the school,
and how can our kids be benefits
of really solid instruction?
And then to maximize, obviously,
their future educational potential.
So we, again, we wanna look at
our patients, in terms of how do
they access their school community?
How do they participate in their school community?
And how do they most importantly make progress
in their school community?
Thinking that school community is
all academic, is all cognitive,
is all social-emotional, is all physical,
is all the realm of being just an awesome child.
So schools are complex.
Medical care is complex.
So the very top component of that.
We have a little bit of a slide showing kind
of a cyclical round of medical treatment,
and that continues to go around,
and around, and around, and that trajectory
of school, that continues on the trajectory.
It's timed-limited.
It is going to happen in that direction.
So we take a look at the complexities
of both of these, and that's really
where the role of the school intervention specialist,
or the school educational specialist,
has their work cut out for them.
We know that early intervention is the
best intervention, and we know
that early intervention also provides the
most success in promoting our positive outcomes.
So this is just a little bit of a slide
to show that, well, we're in third grade,
in elementary, and we've got elementary school figured out.
We have meetings with the teachers.
We have meetings with the staff.
We have meetings with the ISD folks.
We're good to go.
And now we're hitting to middle school
and it's like, okay, middle school.
That's a whole new complex system.
Middle school parents, middle school children,
it is really, it's an odd time.
(laughs)
So we had a little bit of conversation
about this a few days ago when
we first met, and we talked about,
what do we hear as a provider?
And we asked this question.
Gosh, how's school going?
And our patients will, or our families will,
say, oh, it's going fine.
And so our heads think, well, what does that look like?
What does that mean to our providers?
Oh, so you wear the own experiences that you've had.
So if a patient says to you, oh, that's fine,
you're thinking like, oh, they must
really like their teacher, or oh,
it's fine, school lunch must be awesome there,
or oh, it's fine, you must've scored three baskets
at the basketball game last night.
So you kind of wear your own hat with that.
The hat that a educational specialist wears is
very different, and one of the reasons is is
because we've had so much opportunity
to navigate those complexities within our schools.
So when we ask our patients, hey, how's school going?
And they reply, it's fine.
These are the environments that we look at.
So at first glance the conversation doesn't appear
to have a very complex answer.
We kinda take it for its simple answer
because we draw from the experiences
that we visualize our own school experience to have been.
But when a child says that school is
not going well, what do you picture?
So here's a typical book bag of a patient
that may have some learning challenges,
part of that 50% of our kids with CHD.
Not all of our patients have all of these,
but most of our patients have some of these.
So the book bag's full, and it's full
of pencils, it's full of crayons,
it's full of scientific calculators,
it's got some other stuff, an iPhone,
some earbuds, some trash sandwiches,
a granola bar, whatever, but it
also has these things that children bring
to school with them every day.
The part that we wanna look at as well is that area
of recommendations versus instructional strategies.
So we can make recommendations
for challenges that our patients have,
but one of the things that the school specialists can do,
or one of the things
that the educational specialists can be a part of,
is really making the conversation
with the classroom level and look
at the change agents for instructing children
in the way that children learn,
as opposed to accommodating a challenge that a child has.
So school intervention.
It's really an essential part of exceptional care.
Schools need this information.
They need it as early as they can possibly obtain it.
They need it in multiple formats over periods of time.
They need it in a way that they can use it.
And they also need it so that the child benefits
from their education.
When we look at a classroom in America today,
a average classroom teacher, an elementary,
has approximately 30 children in their classroom.
Middle school, probably about 90 children
on their teacher load.
High school, about 130 children on their class list.
That's a lot of kids, and one of the things
that we also know is, statistically,
approximately 20 to 25% of a classroom has
some type of complex medical condition
that needs to be attended to.
So when we have an opportunity
to advocate for our patients and we have an opportunity
to be the voice that connects the medical component
to the school component, that voice becomes a little louder
and becomes a little more pointed,
and we'd like to have that opportunity
to work with our families, and our patients,
and also our school communities in that manner.
So we talk about some purposeful questions.
This slide about, hey, how's school going?
Oh, it's going fine.
A couple of things that providers can do is
to ask just a couple more pointed questions,
like, oh, hey, how do you go through
and explain the medical information to your school?
Or the other one could be like, if available,
who did you give the neuropsych assessment to?
So you're having families report back a little bit.
And then the last one is you can ask a family
to walk through, or ask a patient
to walk through, a part of a child's day.
So an example of that might be a,
walk me from the time you leave the cafeteria
for lunch to your next class, or from the time
you leave the cafeteria to your class.
What does that look like?
Walk me through it.
If I'm following you, what do I see?
And a lot of times that's where
really good information comes out for us.
It's like, oh, I've gotta walk down the hallway,
and then I gotta put my book bag away,
and then I gotta go to the school nurse,
and then I gotta climb three flights
of stairs, and I'm always late to class,
and I've got a lot of fatigue.
And so you really start getting richer information
when you have them kinda walk
through a section of their day.
That might be a little opportunity to do that.
So we're gonna kinda conclude a little bit
about really exceptional care in the medical community.
You provide such exceptional care.
We've heard patients.
We've heard your colleagues talk
about the care that they receive.
We really wanna be able to provide
that exceptional care in the school community,
because when we can put those two things together,
we really have best practice
and we have continuity of care,
and if we look at continuity of care,
we're concerned with quality over time.
And that's what's really important
for our patients because if we reflect
back on the slide that had the steps,
every single educational transition becomes a
more complex event, and the more
we can have that navigated well,
the better opportunity our patients have
for extraordinary, stellar outcomes,
and that's what we all are wanting to see happen.
I thank you.
(applauding)