About the Company
Key2Ed Educator Workshops
When special education was developed and implemented in the public school system, no one had designed a process to make IEP team meetings work. This resulted in a lack of communication, collaboration, and efficiency within IEP teams with less-than-optimal effects on students with special needs. In 1998, the founders of Key2Ed addressed this issue after spending their professional lives in special education and recognizing the need for a process.
Today, through the leadership and vision of owners, Cassie Velasquez and Robin O’Shea, Key2Ed is recognized as the authority on facilitating family and school partnerships.
Listen to Key2Ed’s Cassie Velasquez and Robin O’Shea discuss the keys to faciliating meetings and beyond on the PL Project Podcast.
We conduct workshops for thousands of educators nationwide. We contract with individual school districts, regional cooperatives, and state departments of education to introduce this vital skill set. Clients report overwhelming satisfaction with the training and report that implementation of the training yields improved relationships between staff and families and collaborative meetings that focus on the needs of the student, which ultimately yields positive student outcomes and decreases parent and staff stress.
The Key2Ed workshops are designed to present techniques and strategies to promote effective meeting facilitation. Participants learn to utilize facilitation skills to make meetings run smoothly, efficiently, and collaboratively. Also, participants learn multiple preventions, interventions, and solutions for conflict. These skills result in reduced stress and shortened meetings, all while building trust and a collaborative partnership between and among IEP team members.
On-Going Support
Key2Ed supports participants 24-hour per day, 365 days per year through telephone, email communication, and teleconferencing. If a participant wants a Key2Ed consultant to help them prepare for an upcoming IEP meeting and/or debrief after a meeting, an associate is available to coach the participant.
This enables Key2Ed to ensure that the process will be used properly and to the maximum benefit for IEP meeting participants. It also reduces the possibility of the “dusty manual syndrome,” that is, workshops where information is presented and even implemented for a short time, and then shelved for lack of support from the workshop presenters.
After attending and conducting thousands of IEP meetings, we originally set out to find a process or a program to address conflict in IEP meetings. After spending more than twenty years training thousands of educators on the principles of IEP meeting facilitation, we’ll continue serving our passion – the best possible IEPs that allow our students to achieve to their maximum ability.
Targeted Participants
Suggested participants for Key2Ed workshops include:
- Special education administrators
- Building level administrators
- Special education teachers
- General education teachers
- IEP coordinators
- School support staff such as school psychologists and speech specialists
- Parents
- Students
- State Neutral Facilitators
- State Mediators