0:00:05.4 Vickie: Welcome to the Inclusive Education Project. I'm Vickie Brett.

0:00:09.2 Amanda: I'm Amanda Selogie. We're two civil rights lawyers on a mission to change the conversation about education, civil rights, and modern activism.

0:00:19.5 Vickie: Each week we're gonna explore new topics which are going to educate and empower others.

0:00:25.8 Amanda: And give them a platform to enact change in education and level the playing field.

0:00:34.1 Amanda: Welcome back friends.

0:00:39.1 Vickie: Hello. For some, they haven't finished the school year, and for others you are very close to finishing.

0:00:47.2 Amanda: Yeah. Yeah. We're almost there.

0:00:49.5 Vickie: Yeah, we in Southern California have May Gray and then we quickly get into June Gloom, so that's where we're at, and I think the weather's just been so weird for everybody.

0:00:56.0 Amanda: Well, yeah, we're having crazy weather all across the country. I recently saw some footage of like some tornadoes that I know are hitting many states and just like devastating people's homes, and like talk about like not even being able to just focus on the end of the school year because now you've like lost your home from a tornado. Like it's, I feel like everything I'm seeing is like crazy weather all across the country. So as much as I wanna be like, "Oh so sad we have gray skies," it's not that bad.

0:01:27.0 Vickie: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for making me look so shallow as a Californian. No, obviously it's really important for us to acknowledge 'cause a lot of people are not just Southern Californian, which is how we're able to kind of connect with a lot of you guys in our DMs, if you will. And I know it's that rush for the end of the school year and we typically see an increase in people that wanna get a jumpstart on next school year, and that's why we are really excited to have Santanna on our podcast today. This is actually going to be a part one of our part two, because we have a lot to unpack with them. And we are just so excited to have you on. Thank you so much for coming on Santanna.

0:02:08.4 Santanna: I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me on to kind of talk about the things that I'm doing with Minnesota NEAT.

0:02:16.4 Vickie: Yes. Can you kind of give a little bit of, obviously we know you're a mental health practitioner, you've been one from, for over 10 years. How did you get into this space of advocacy?

0:02:27.9 Santanna: So the kind of cool thing about Minnesota is you don't have to go to school to be a mental health practitioner. We kind of fill in more of like the entry-level aspects of mental health. So mental health practitioners typically work on crisis teams, providing skills for adults and children. So I focus on therapeutic skills for children and their families. So I actually started out working overnights in group homes, and that counts as supervised experience. So the criteria for a mental health practitioner is 6,000 hours supervised experience, or four years with a associated degree to the field. So I started off in group homes after getting my experience for mental health practitioner. I started as a behavior therapist for an ABA center, which I'm not very proud of, but that's kind of what led to advocacy. I didn't... So I'm a late recognized autistic, and it was a self-advocate on line who kind of like was calling me out on some of the things that I was saying. They had shared that ABA was abuse, and it was really hard for me to hear at the time because I thought that I was doing really great things and supporting the kids that I was working with. So that kind of got me into listening to autistic voices and really learning about the neurodiversity movement.

0:04:03.2 Santanna: One of the things that really hit me at the time was this idea of identity-first language because working in mental health, especially just as a direct support professional, and working in the ABA center, it is drilled into your head that, no, you use person-first language. They are not their disability. The fact that autistics wanted to be referred to as autistic was just mind-blowing to me. So I continued to listen and I eventually left ABA because of the practices and things that I was learning and got into the position that I am now. So I'm still a mental health practitioner, but I provide CTSS services and that means child therapeutic services and support. We, our program is more focused on stabilization. So like we're one step above outpatient therapy and like one step below residential.

0:04:55.9 Vickie: Okay.

0:04:55.9 Santanna: So we work in-home and learning about the neurodiversity movement and more affirming practices and really understanding trauma-informed practices and attachment and all of those things together really got me to thinking about my ability to work with schools for my clients 'cause we are able to work in the school. I attend IEP meetings, and it was really becoming apparent that a lot of the things that were leading to my client's "behavior", I don't like using that term in that sense, but leading to their challenging behaviors was a lot of the things that was happening in the school and my role is to help stabilize those behaviors. So that got me learning about how to do more advocacy and what special education is all about.

0:05:43.5 Vickie: Yeah, and what's wonderful is it's all interconnected. So the work that you started doing to hear autistics, and to bring them to the table, and to really just change your perspective. What I'd like to do is take a step back, and I know one of the things that you also do are presentations and teach people, what is something that people need to know about ableism?

0:06:09.3 Santanna: Well, I'll kind of to go back for a quick sec, because within all of the self-study and things that I was learning, I then discovered that I was autistic. I had known that I was an ADHD-er, but that didn't really matter to me before really understanding what ADHD is and neurotypes and being autistic. And then I discovered my friend Lizzi who is an occupational therapist. She is the president of Minnesota NEAT. That stands for Neurodivergent Education Advocacy and Therapy Services. And I became really good friends with her and a board member for Minnesota NEAT. And that's where the presentations have kind of came in. So Minnesota NEAT, we are focused on disability justice and across the lifespan, so anywhere that there is ableism, if we can get in there and try to advocate and educate and support individuals, then that really is our main focus in any way that we can.

0:07:11.5 Vickie: And I think that starts with as much as... And Amanda and I have had conversations about this, humans love to label. And as much as those labels, and same, like behavior is a form of communication, like if we're trying to address the behavior, like what is the root cause, not just like the symptoms, that a lot of times IEP teams want to try to address the symptoms rather than the root cause. And so how does ableism play a part. From my perspective, I am not someone with ADHD or with autism. It is on me to take the opportunity to learn as much as I can, just like you did. In the context of the law, like, the law. But I think what Amanda and I do and what we are able to accomplish with all the additional trainings that we do at different conferences, and with this podcast is to learn from others. So I would love to kind of hear your take on ableism so that the listeners can really kind of get an understanding and then we can kind of move into like how we can shift the perspective that a lot of people have when they come to IEP meetings and wanna label.

0:08:28.9 Santanna: Perfect. So I'd actually like to read the quote from TL Lewis and Dustin Gibson. So, "Ableism is a system that places value on people's bodies and minds based on societally-constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, excellence, and productivity. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, colonialism, and capitalism. This form of systemic oppression leads to people in society determining who is valuable and worthy based on a person's appearance and their ability to satisfactorily produce, reproduce, excel, and behave." Every presentation that I do, that quote is in every single one. It is just... It's kind of hard to listen to.

0:09:23.6 Amanda: Yeah.

0:09:24.9 Vickie: Oh, I was going to say, yeah, and I think it's so powerful. It really puts together so many of the things. Like I said, we'll just kind of wanna label things, put it in a little box, and just have it in that little box, and it overlaps with so many things.

0:09:42.7 Santanna: Oh yes. Ableism is the intersection of all intersections, 'cause disability, and since ableism is the discrimination against disabled people, and it is the intersection, that is in every single intersection.

0:09:54.4 Amanda: Yeah, and when we start to label individuals with disabilities, it happens most of the time, not always, of course, just like in your situation, but when people are children, when they're young, when they are still learning who they are, they're still learning basic skills. Often, we get a lot of kiddos, especially with a diagnosis of autism, when they are birth to three, we get a lot of diagnoses, and, of course, there's other later diagnoses as well, but we are placing a lot on a child, and that shapes so much of who they become and how they live their lives. And I think that that quote is very meaning and powerful because we need to be thinking about it from that perspective as well of how different their life would be if we thought about things differently and we'd approach things when they're very young, much more differently. And I think it's important in presentations you do and why we wanted to talk about this on the podcast because we have so many educators and parents of young children that listen to really be able to see things from this perspective and maybe shape the way that we approach young children.

0:11:11.3 Santanna: Yes, so there's actually three types of ableism that, it's institutional ableism, internalized ableism, and interpersonal ableism. So institutionalized ableism is the way that society has been built upon the norms that are harmful towards disabled people. So think of it like systemic ableism. And the entire educational system has its own specific ableism that is intertwined into all areas from the education that teachers receive, mental health professionals receive, the expectations within the school environment, how I even consider just the goal under IDEA for IEPs, that is really clearly systemic ableism because if you really think about it, the purpose of an IEP is to teach the disabled person the skills so they can be able to produce as an adult.

0:12:16.5 Vickie: That is very accurate. And in trying to accomplish that, you're erasing part of the person right in front of you, the square peg in the round hole. And I think, when we are speaking to our clients, technically the client is the child, but we are speaking to the person responsible for the child more often than not the parent or other caregiver or guardian. And what is oftentimes so difficult is that the parent may not have any type of disability. Sometimes they do, and they're still in denial. And sometimes they do, they acknowledge it and they have this unique perspective, I'm thinking of this one client that I had a few years ago who had dyslexia, and both of his children had dyslexia, and at IEP meetings it was so fascinating hearing him speak because you could tell he was like advocating for himself as a kid, but as an adult for his children. He always brought such a unique perspective that people weren't thinking about. And we see that with others at the IEP team meetings, the speech and language pathologist who has a son with autism, they'll bring a unique perspective, or even just the teacher has a child with ADHD, so they know some of the things that they can do just for every child. And that is great, but it's so few and far between.

0:13:51.0 Santanna: Yeah.

0:13:54.5 Vickie: How do you try to combat that? Is it more so just trying to enlighten people as to the ableism that is happening? Or are you more focused on the advocacy component for that particular child at the meeting?

0:14:11.1 Santanna: So it's kind of twofold. So I'm going to briefly touch on the other two types of ableism.

0:14:16.6 Vickie: Oh, yes, please.

0:14:17.5 Santanna: Because then that's kind of really is able to kind of bring it back around to be able to answer your question. So we have internalized ableism. So this is a disabled person's learned acceptance of the societal stereotypes about themselves. Then we have interpersonal ableism. So this is the implicit and explicit bias surrounding disability and social interactions and relationships. And all of these three things work together. So like internalized ableism, that's all of those internalized narratives. I need to be able to work harder. And that can come from interpersonal ableism. One of the phrases that is really uncomfortable for us to hear is that it's not a disability, it's a different ability, or like autism being a superpower. Because it's just really invalidating of what we experience. And there's this idea that we just constantly need to be reaching goals and overcome our disabilities. And that kind of goes into the different models of disability itself, which the medical model really focuses on the disability is something that needs to be cured and changed. It's a deficit, and it's everybody else's responsibility to change it. It needs to be fixed. But the social model of disability focuses on what's most disabling is inaccessible environments.

0:15:50.8 Santanna: And that's the purpose of an IEP is to help create that access to education so they can get their faith. And then with Lizzi and I doing... So one of the reframes that I do prefer to say is accessible education versus special education. But you do have to use those legal terms. Whenever we're advocating for special education in those meetings, we already know that it's difficult if you don't have this perspective of neurodiversity and ableism and social justice to go into those meetings and advocate, even if you have the same perspective as that school team, then you have us going in, not only trying to advocate with the systemic barriers that are already in place, we're also trying to educate and advocate against the systemic ableism and help change the perspective of these IEP teams to assure that the student has an affirming education experience. And we get so much resistance. And I understand. It's a lot to try to fit into a 45-minute meeting when you don't have that ability to form those relationships.

0:17:11.8 Santanna: And you already have the label as an advocate going into those meetings, so their nervous system is already dysregulated. You're also an outside person trying to explain that what they're doing is harming this child. That has another layer of defense that causes that resistance. And it's really difficult to try to navigate on how to like bridge these barriers between us and like school teams and to really help redirect the conversation onto the child.

0:17:43.3 Vickie: What's one thing that you would want a school team to know, or is there something that you usually kind of start out with when you attend the meeting?

0:17:54.3 Santanna: So given some of our experiences this year and conversations, something that I proposed to Lizzi that I think that we're going to start doing is reaching out to school teams proactively and just saying, "Hey, this is what we do. This is our experience. The family has sought us out to help with this conversation and these things for the student. We understand that having outside people is really difficult and that you guys have your own barriers that you're trying to navigate through, and that it can feel really invalidating 'cause you guys do have education, and that we really just ask that we respect your perspective and your guys's difficulty and the things that you know, but we also would like you to respect ours." And if we could have just like informal meeting where we can have a connection with each other and try to really bridge some of those difficulties, because it's not their fault that these things are so ingrained that that's what they know.

0:18:58.2 Vickie: Right.

0:19:00.2 Amanda: Right.

0:19:00.5 Vickie: Right, right, right.

0:19:00.6 Amanda: Well, and we completely... Being proactive and having as much transparency as we can really helps, in our experience, for sure, it helps bridge that gap between the us versus them. People don't know what they don't know. And if we are trying to educate them, not just on something that's new, but also if a family is coming in with a perspective that may not be the same as the other kids going into IEPs, it's important that the school team has time to digest that information and come to an IEP meeting really ready to discuss rather than having to take a second to try to understand. So I love that recommendation of if you can, set the stage before the IEP, especially if we're having these short IEPs, which, that's another tangent we can talk about. But, at the end of the day, if everyone's goal is to support this student in any way that we can, we wanna make sure, and I think that it's a really important point that the priorities of every student may not be the same, and sometimes when we look at what's a priority for this student.

0:20:14.2 Amanda: Like if they're advocating for themselves, sometimes it's, they really wanna have academic rigor. Other times it's we wanna have access to general education. And there's always that push and pull of like, well, academically, what do we need to be doing? But if there's other priorities at play here, education isn't just about academics. And that shared perspective can really, I think, go a long way. So I love those. If you start doing that, we'd love to hear more about how that goes and how teams react to it and hopefully embrace it.

0:20:46.1 Santanna: And it's actually kind of funny that it's taken me this long to really like think about it from that perspective because it, basically the exact thing that we're advocating for across the board is co-regulation, understanding what the right dose is for this student's nervous system, because if the expectations are too high, then they're not going to be able to meet that, then they're dysregulated and then we're going into this cycle and then they don't have access to their upstairs brain to be able to learn. But then to take this long, for me, is really like one of those lived experiences of just doing the work to get the experience to learn these things of the school teams need that same approach. Going in and trying to like explain like a completely different philosophy and being like, "So we don't recommend a functional behavior assessment for this child." And then it's like, "What do you mean? This is what we've done this whole time." And then try to like give so much information as into why is just too much of a dose for an entire team to try to process. So.

0:21:58.1 Amanda: That's progress takes time, even if you have everybody on board and willing, which isn't always the case. But if you do have a team that's like, "We really do wanna learn and collaborate," it's not going to be instantaneous. And I think that sometimes is where there's communication breakdowns is that the expectations are not on the same page, if one side expects... Just like the school district, they expect parents to just immediately understand IEPs from the get-go, and it's like, that's a new experience, that's a new perspective they need to learn. And so we have to understand that that, for the change, especially with these systemic things that it's, things have been done this way for so many years, we have to have a little bit of patience if we truly want like substantial change. Not just them saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we got it. We're gonna do this." But to truly make sure that they understand why they're doing it is a whole thing.

0:22:55.4 Santanna: So something that Not An Autism Mom really talks about is using plain language in IEP.

0:23:03.5 Vickie: Okay. Yeah.

0:23:05.3 Santanna: And something else that she talks about along with nigh-functioning autism is that really hitting... They really explain it in just a beautiful way, which is, an IEP is to tell the adults how to support my child. You're reading the IEPs and if the language doesn't explain how to support the child, then that needs to change, because how many students who have one-on-one paras, those are the direct people who are supporting the child, but they're not included in the IEPs, and the IEPs are written in extremely formal language that if they're reading it and they don't understand, they're the one who is directly responsible for that student's needs and supports and access to their education, and if they can't even understand it, then the IEP can't be implemented.

0:23:54.2 Amanda: Right, absolutely. So I think that there's so much that we can get into about like the actual IEP and how we can like some real life examples. And so I know we're going to have a part two to go deeper into the actual like practical tips for the IEPs. So we're so appreciative of you being here for our listeners. We're going to have a part two coming up next week. So stay tuned for that where we get even deeper.

0:24:23.0 Vickie: And Santanna, do you want to let the listeners know how they can reach out to you?

0:24:27.5 Santanna: For sure. So I will make sure that I send you a link to the Minnesota NEAT's website.

0:24:34.4 Vickie: Wonderful.

0:24:34.5 Santanna: I will also include my direct email address 'cause I don't have one specifically for Minnesota NEAT yet, and they can get a hold of me that way.

0:24:43.4 Vickie: Wonderful. Check that out in the show notes, and we will talk to you next week.

0:24:47.0 Amanda: Bye.

0:24:51.0 Vickie: Bye.