The Irregular Newsletter*, #1 — 17 November 2024

Thank you for being a part of our Parents Alliance for Inclusion community.

As we arrive at our one year anniversary since our official launch (today!), it’s long overdue to start a newsletter!

Not a member? To gain access to our exclusive content please register for free and please fill out our optional registration survey. (It will only take 5 minutes)

Survey Results To-Date

Early survey trends show roughly 1 in 3 families surveyed has always felt well served by the international schools their children have attended. On the other hand, over 50% of those who have filled out the surveys have at least one of:

• changed international schools because they were at an international school that could not support their child well;
• have homeschooled their child because the international schools near their location could not meet all the needs of their child;
• or moved back to their home country because education in the international school ecosystem no longer seemed possible.

Invitation to Register and Share our Information

When you share links to join Parents Alliance for Inclusion with your network, please encourage everyone to fill out the optional survey when they register. To that point, here is an 11 minute video invitation to join Parents Alliance for Inclusion that can be shared with your networks.

Please encourage members of your community to register with our website for free and fill out the optional survey when they do.

The optional survey is only available at the time of registration to ensure our results are as reliable as possible, the results of one snapshot in time for each member of our website. (If you missed it, no worries, we will have other membership surveys at a later date.)

The optional survey is “off site” with Jotform to ensure the data on the forms is not linked to the data submitted to register with our website (e.g. name, email).

[For below image: Click to expand. On mobile hold finger on photo to save photo to read more easily.]

Website Reorganization

Our website has been reorganized.

Click on “About” now to reveal it’s nine sections available to view without membership.

We have moved the “register” button to the top left on computers and top of the main menu list on mobile phones.

Our new “donate” button is on the top right on computers and at the bottom of the main menu list on mobile phones. We are now able to accept donations via credit card and Pay Pal online, as well as ACH and wire transfers.

Click on Community Hub now and you will see nine sections including:

• Parents Support Groups now has its own direct link; scroll on down past the tags and map and there’s our full list, so far.
• What was under “Services & Support” on the old main menu is now under Service Providers.
• What was “Resources” on the old main menu is now under Media Resources.
• Pithy Quotes from Peer-Reviewed Research now has its own direct link.

“Best of” Lists

We previously had one “highlights” section in the old Community Hub, we are now adding individual resource lists by topic.

“Best of” lists are our effort to curate a mixed list of 10 to 30 media resources on a topic. They are compiled from the perspective of a generalist. These lists may not be the right fit for your child. Our goal is that these sources will be a starting point that leads to the information that is the right fit for your family. We have 100s of media resources on our website, and that can be overwhelming. We offer these “best of” lists as what we collectively think are the best places to start exploring relevant information on our community’s site on your journey to finding the information that works for your family.

Best of lists we have so far:

• ADHD
• Autism
• Dyslexia
• Social and Emotional Wellbeing

More are coming. If there’s a “best of” list you would like to see soon, let us know!

Crowdsourced Counsel

These are intended to become open-source community experience informed threads about what works for some community members in different situations we face as parents. They are not meant to be prescriptive. The goal is to provide a menu of ideas. We welcome your comments on what works for you to grow the menu of ideas for our community.

Crowdsourced Counsel threads are already started on.

• Parent-teacher conferences (updated this month)
• Parent-teacher conferences in a language that is not your mother tongue
• Reading ILPs / IEPs (updated this month)
• Lobbying Schools for Better Inclusion Services (new this month)
• Questions to Ask Service Providers (new this month)

More are coming. If there’s a Crowdsourced Counsel section you would like to see soon, let us know!

Podcast

Options to listen to our first podcast are found here to:
Episode 1 of the Illuminating International Inclusion podcast: “The Island”.

Showcase Your Child’s Artwork

We now have an artwork section where we welcome submissions of your children’s art to be displayed on the website, and we also have a link to an art gallery of all art currently in our website library.

All art on our site that is not our logo is, and will be, artworks of registered members’ children. As an organization working for the inclusion of all our children, we decided we should decorate the site with their artistic expression.

Parents Alliance for Inclusion Media Content

Published work related to our mission by all Board and Advisory Board members, as well as the archives of our newsletter, will be aggregated in our Media Content section now.

While published articles will be in this section, follow our Board Members and Advisory Board Members on LinkedIn and other social media for posts about inclusion such as:

• this post by Jon Springer questioning the International Baccalaureate’s lack of high school diploma pathways for all our families;
• this post by Roslyn Dotterweich on being rejected by multiple schools before finding one;
• this post by Dr. MaryAnn DeRosa with a comic highlighting the added challenge for students that are pulled out of class regularly;
• this share by Nicole Demos on the meaning of the Disability Pride flag during a month of great posts for Disability pride month;
• posts from Sarah Garner about ADHD and neurodivergence like this one about emotional dysregulation and ADHD;
• this post by Katrina Daniels-Samasa about her son;
• this post from the Parents Alliance for Inclusion’s LinkedIn page about paying attention to the quiet students in schools that has been shared over 50 times.

Would you like support starting a Parent Support Group for Parents of Neurodivergent and Disabled Children at your school? Or in your region?

Jon, Sarah, Jenny, Francisco, Delia, and Nikki — Board and Advisory Board members — have all started support groups in the past. Reach out to us by email and one or more of us can offer you support in starting a support group.
(email us at facilitators@parentsallianceforinclusion.com) (facilitators@parentsallianceforinclusion.com)

Also, in our resources there is the SENIA Parents’ Guidebook to Creating Parent Support Groups which Sarah and Jon helped author.

Association for the Advancement of International Education (AAIE) Institute Course Development

Parents Alliance for Inclusion Board and Advisory Board members participated this past year in revisions to seven AAIE Institute Leadership Courses. These seven courses can be taken toward Ph.D. credit at Wilkes University and are designed for current and future international school leadership (Heads of School and Principals).

Thanks to Katrina Daniels-Samasa, Lauren Jones, Meera Raghu, Roslyn Dotterweich, MaryAnn DeRosa, Kelvin Wangara, and Matthew Savage from our Advisory Board and Board who all contributed, and will be listed as such on the Course Developer page soon. Executive Facilitator Jon Springer is listed as a Course Developer and appears in one of the videos promoting the new courses (video above).

Outgoing and Incoming Board Members

Our Board is designed that at the end of each calendar year, terms of three Board members conclude. While there is an option to seek to stay on the Board, this year we have three Board members stepping down at the end of 2024 who joined our Board to help our startup and launch.

Nikki Moffitt is someone some of us call our international school inclusion community godmother. Nikki continues to manage the Expats Kids Learning Differently parent support group on Facebook where many parents in our community first connected. Nikki will remain on our Advisory Board.

Dave Pantos will remain “of counsel” to us as a legal advisor. We appreciate Dave’s support in helping us migrate Parents Alliance for Inclusion from an idea to a registered USA nonprofit.

Lisa Biasillo will always be the first person that said “yes” to joining the inaugural Board of Parents Alliance for Inclusion. As a former international school director of three different schools, Lisa has added a lot of value and input to our governance.

While our Board is always a majority of parents, from the start we believed we needed 3 to 4 international school educators to ensure our efforts to change the international school ecosystem are grounded in proven pedagogical possibility.

Today at our 4th quarter Board meeting, we voted on new incoming Board members with three year terms from January 2025 to December 2027. Their extended bios can all currently be found on our Advisory Board page.

Francisco Marambio is the parent of two neurodivergent school age boys. He has started parent support groups at his children’s current and prior international schools.

Nicole Demos has been a disabled student and a disabled teacher at international schools. From her poetry to her work with Diversability, she is a great voice and advocate of disability inclusion.

Lauren Jones is a former international school director. She has a peer-reviewed chapter being published later this year on how she expanded inclusion as head of school. Among her consulting specialities is building community buy-in for inclusion.

We are grateful for the volunteer commitment of our incoming Board members, and all the work Advisory Board members do.

We deeply appreciate the work of Lisa, Dave, and Nikki in their time on our Board with an abundance of gratitude.

* Why is it called “The Irregular Newsletter”?

Our intention is to share a new newsletter when we think we have enough new information to share. We aim for the newsletters to become more frequent, and at the same time, we know everyone has busy lives and full email boxes. Therefore, we would rather our newsletter be like an “irregular friend”, a friend that you don’t see often, yet is always good to see and easy to interact with.

Thank you!

Thank you for being part of our growing community!