6th Annual RC SELPA Mental Health Symposium: Mental Health Matters

In this engaging and inspirational keynote, Kyle Greene will deliver his signature message, Serve the Best Lemonade, focusing on the importance of seeing and tapping into the potential of every student. Using a dynamic, live lemonade-making demonstration, he will illustrate how meaningful connections, and genuine relationships can help students overcome adversity, unlock their greatness, and find true success in and out of the classroom. This keynote is designed to empower and inspire educators, administrators, and school leaders to transform school culture and foster student achievement.

Key Objectives:

1. Recognize and Harness Potential: Equip educators with strategies to identify and nurture the hidden potential within every student, advancing growth and confidence.
2. Build Authentic Relationships: Highlight the power of authentic connections in creating supportive learning environments that inspire engagement and academic success.
3. Build Good Student Equity: Show educators how to build good student equity within their students, leading to better classroom management, increased student engagement and success, and a positive classroom culture and climate.

In this engaging and inspirational keynote, Kyle Greene will deliver his signature message, Serve the Best Lemonade, focusing on the importance of seeing and tapping into the potential of every student. Using a dynamic, live lemonade-making demonstration, he will illustrate how meaningful connections, and genuine relationships can help students overcome adversity, unlock their greatness, and find true success in and out of the classroom. This keynote is designed to empower and inspire educators, administrators, and school leaders to transform school culture and foster student achievement.

Key Objectives:

1. Recognize and Harness Potential: Equip educators with strategies to identify and nurture the hidden potential within every student, advancing growth and confidence.
2. Build Authentic Relationships: Highlight the power of authentic connections in creating supportive learning environments that inspire engagement and academic success.
3. Build Good Student Equity: Show educators how to build good student equity within their students, leading to better classroom management, increased student engagement and success, and a positive classroom culture and climate.

In school communities, moments of stress, conflict, or crisis can shape how people communicate, make decisions, and support one another. Under pressure, even well-intentioned professionals can fall into survival-mode patterns that impact trust, accountability, and connection across a school system.
This interactive session explores how stress responses influence behavior in real time and how all partners within a school ecosystem can stay grounded and respond from their values rather than their stress reactions. Participants will learn practical strategies to recognize their own patterns, regulate their responses under pressure, and navigate difficult conversations with greater clarity and intention.

By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Recognize survival-mode patterns in themselves and others during moments of stress or conflict
• Understand how stress responses shape relational dynamics across a school system
• Apply trauma-informed approaches to communication and conflict that support accountability, repair, and a culture of belonging

Complex student cases often feel like a tangled ball of yarn. Is it Social Maladjustment or Emotional Disturbance? Is it substance abuse or a coping mechanism for underlying trauma? When the lines are blurred, a single perspective isn't always enough.

Join a School Psychologist, a Clinical Therapist, and a District Coordinator as we unpack the "Joint Assessment Model." We will demonstrate how combining the educational eligibility lens (School Psych) with the clinical treatment lens (Therapist) creates a 3D picture of the student that neither professional could capture alone.

Through a deep dive into our most complex "mystery cases"—involving adoption dynamics, dual diagnoses, and murky distinctives—we will show you how to layer standardized rating scales with clinical therapeutic measures. Attendees will leave with a blueprint for collaboration that not only clarifies eligibility but paves the way for effective treatment.

Learning Objectives:
Upon completion of this session, attendees will be able to:

1. Establish Defensible Best Practices: formulate a legally defensible and practically effective framework for conducting joint mental health assessments.
2. Synthesize the Lenses: Demonstrate how merging the educational (IDEA) and clinical perspectives leads to more accurate eligibility determinations and highly targeted social-emotional IEP goals.
3. Toolbox Integration: Identify specific intersections where standardized psychologist rating scales and therapist clinical measures complement each other to rule out (or rule in) Behavior Disorders/Social Maladjustment
4. Collaborative Workflow: Apply a framework for joint testing sessions and parent interviews that reduces redundancy and increases diagnostic accuracy in complex cases.

This training equips educators to respond to problem behavior with confidence—without relying on punitive measures. Grounded in ABA, participants learn to catch students doing the right thing, teach coping and replacement skills, and build reinforcement-rich environments. By viewing behavior deficits as teachable skills, this therapeutic (though not talk-based) approach strengthens regulation, resilience, and student mental health.

Participants will:

• Feel better equipped to respond to problem behavior in the classroom
• Be less reliant on corrective and punitive measures to handle problem behavior
• Understand how positive reinforcement and teaching coping skills and replacement behaviors promote better mental health

In education, support services, and mental health work, relationships are everything. Before students buy into strategies, interventions, or accountability, they first need to feel safe, seen, heard, and valued. The same applies to staff teams, leadership, and family partnerships.
In this powerful and interactive 90-minute workshop, Coach BE blends storytelling, practical strategies, humor, and real-life experience to explore the delicate balance between truth and trust in today’s schools and support systems. Participants will learn how to communicate honestly without damaging relationships, build trust while maintaining accountability, and create environments where students, families, and staff feel connected instead of corrected.
Drawing from over 25 years of experience in special education, juvenile probation, youth development, recreation, coaching, and behavioral support, Coach BE provides practical tools that professionals can immediately apply in classrooms, counseling spaces, IEP meetings, staff culture, and everyday interactions.
This session goes beyond motivation. It challenges participants to reflect on how their communication, consistency, energy, and leadership impact the people they serve.
Participants will leave with:

• Practical strategies for building trust with students, families, and co-workers
• Tools for navigating difficult conversations with empathy and accountability
• Techniques for improving staff culture, communication, and emotional safety
• A deeper understanding of how connection influences behavior, engagement, and outcomes
• Actionable ways to lead with honesty while still protecting relationships

This workshop is ideal for:

• Educators
• School counselors
• Mental health therapists
• Administrators
• Paraeducators
• Support staff
• School psychologists
• Youth-serving professionals

Real conversations. Real strategies. Real connection.
Because people grow best in environments where truth is spoken with care and trust is built with consistency.

Students often arrive at school carrying emotional stress. Their nervous systems are shaped by overwhelm, trauma, and uncertainty. In response, educators and counselors frequently focus on helping students regulate emotions enough to return to class. While these strategies are important, they may not fully address the underlying emotional experience students are navigating.

This presentation explores the difference between coping, regulation, and true emotional processing. Participants will learn how unfinished emotional responses can remain in the body and contribute to ongoing dysregulation. Through reflection, discussion, and practical examples, attendees will explore how presence, body awareness, and relational safety can help students move toward emotional completion and return to a more regulated and connected state.

This session provides practical, classroom-ready behavior support strategies designed for Pre-K through 2nd grade general education settings. Grounded in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and aligned with PBIS and MTSS frameworks, this presentation focuses on proactive approaches that prevent challenging behaviors before they escalate.

Participants will learn how to strengthen Tier 1 classroom systems, effectively use reinforcement, and implement group contingencies to improve engagement and behavior across the classroom. The session also introduces key concepts such as understanding the function of behavior, the ABCs of behavior, and how to apply simple antecedent strategies to support diverse student needs.

Attendees will leave with clear, actionable tools that can be implemented immediately to create more structured, positive, and manageable classroom environments—even in settings with limited staffing or support.

Move beyond compliance-based behavioral models toward a neuro-affirming, trauma-informed co-regulation practice. Grounded in Dr. Palmer’s TEDx Talk, this session introduces the C.A.L.M. framework—a physiological intervention for high-intensity environments. Participants will learn to prioritize nervous system safety over behavioral control, gaining practical tools to stabilize dysregulated students while maintaining their own clinical and emotional equilibrium.

Participants will master the C.A.L.M. protocol to bridge the gap between "crisis management" and "whole-child wellness." The outcome is for ERMHS providers and educators to:

1. Identify the Neuro-Biological Shift: Recognize the transition from the "Social Engagement System" to "Survival Mode" before a behavioral outburst occurs.
2. Apply Neuro-Affirming Co-Regulation: Implement the C.A.L.M. steps to de-escalate without power struggles, honoring the student’s physiological needs.
3. Practice Self-Stabilization: Utilize "Thermostat" strategies to remain the regulated anchor in a dysregulated environment, reducing staff burnout and secondary trauma.

Romoland School District’s Director of Special Education and BCBA share their journey of establishing a robust Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS). This session explores practical frameworks for meeting diverse behavioral needs, highlighting the collaborative strategies used to build a sustainable, district-wide infrastructure that fosters student success across all tiers.

Participants will leave with a scalable roadmap for integrating BCBA expertise into district-wide MTSS frameworks. Attendees will gain specific strategies for aligning behavioral interventions across tiers, establishing data-driven referral processes, and fostering the administrative-specialist collaboration necessary to sustain a proactive, inclusive school culture.

In today’s educational and mental health systems, professionals are often tasked with addressing complex student needs—but without a clear distinction between mental health and behavioral health, interventions can become misaligned, inefficient, and less impactful.

This dynamic and practical session breaks down the critical differences between mental health and behavioral health, helping participants **work smarter—not harder—when supporting students, clients, and communities. The session provides a clear framework for identifying when challenges are rooted in emotional/psychological needs versus behavioral patterns, and how to respond with targeted, effective strategies.

Educators and mental health professionals often support the same students using different strategies across settings and times. While each approach may be effective on its own, a lack of alignment can make it difficult for students to apply those strategies during moments of high stress.

This session introduces the Escalation Accountability Sequence™, a practical framework that helps participants understand how behavior unfolds over time and how brain states impact a student’s ability to respond to support, instruction, and accountability. Participants will explore why well-intentioned strategies sometimes fail in real-world settings. Then, with this foundation in place, participants will be introduced the DIOR Cycle™, a collaborative process that connects classroom implementation with counseling support. Attendees will learn how to align strategies across roles, use real-time feedback to strengthen interventions, and build a more cohesive system that leads to lasting behavior change.