Guide to Future Planning . The ten workshops comprising this series were designed to further develop parent-professional partnerships in the education of students with special needs. The workshop series was initially developed for use by Parent Resource Centers in the states of Virginia and West Virginia. The purpose of these local centers, staffed by a parent of a student with special needs and a professional, is to deliver training and resource information to parents and professionals in their community. All of the workshops are to be presented by a team comprised of a parent and one or more professionals.
Several workshops designate a principal to be one of the professionals conducting the training.
A basic thread woven throughout the Partnership Series is the assumption that school professionals and parents all desire to work together for the benefit of children with special needs. The workshops address specific concerns voiced by parents and professionals and are numbered in the order that they were developed over a three-year period. Each of the workshops was developed and field tested by the Parent Educational Advocacy Training Center in Alexandria, Virginia, in cooperation with a local Parent Resource Center. The Departments of Education in Virginia and West Virginia supported this project through federal grants for personnel preparation. Centers throughout these two states and Parent Resource Centers now established in Maryland and Kentucky are presenting these workshops as a part of their local staff development or in-service training programs.