CORD: Special Education Advocacy Training
Easterseals and researchers at the Collaborate on Racialized Disability (CORD) are offering a free, online training to special education advocates. This training is for special education advocates looking to understand how anti-Black racism interferes with educational supports. The curriculum also explores services for Black students with disabilities.
To sign up, please fill out the survey below.
Do you identify as a special education advocate?
About Collaborative on Racialized Disability (CORD)
Easterseals has partnered with researchers at CORD on an initiative to improve access to special education resources for families of Black students with disabilities. The initiative addresses a pressing need to eliminate disparities in special education services for Black children and youth by identifying, recruiting, and training existing special education advocates to prepare them to better serve Black students with disabilities by centering the needs and experiences of their families and promoting more equitable and inclusive special education access and practices.
Black students encounter wide inequities in services provided within specialized education programs. Black youth with disabilities are disproportionately represented in special education and more likely to experience exclusionary disciplinary actions from schools. Anti-Black racism and ableism – a system that assigns value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideals of normalcy and intelligence – exacerbate the challenges Black families face when navigating and accessing high quality special education services. Yet typical trainings for special education advocates tend not to directly address the uniqueness and complexity of Black families’ experiences.
Learn more about the outcomes from the initial phase of a special education advocate training course, developed through our partnership with CORD researchers which addresses the pressing need to serve Black students with disabilities and their families.
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