Episode Description
Vincent Valerio’s unconventional journey from being an artist who became special education director reveals that expertise in serving children with disabilities flourishes in diverse backgrounds and real-world experience. At Portage County Board of Developmental Disabilities in Ohio, Vincent has built a county-wide collaboration model that provides free training, adaptive equipment, and transition programming to 11 public school districts—a level of integration that most county boards don’t attempt. Discover how county-level flexibility and listening to community needs creates sustainable solutions that traditional educational credentials alone cannot.
Noteable Quotes
“My formal background is actually in fine art.” [00:00:33]
“I don’t know much about working with kids with autism, but I can do that part.” [00:00:00]
“That’s a hard in-between stage where there’s not always clear funding and support.” [00:00:00]
“It’s not typical to have that level of extensive outreach programs and collaboration.” [00:00:00]
“What does the community need? That’s what I did. I just went out and started talking and shaking hands.” [00:07:26]
Full Podcast Transcript
Janet Courtney [00:00:01]
Hello everyone and welcome to the brighter together podcast. My name is Janet Courtney and my special guest today is Vincent Valerio. Vincent is the director of education and children’s services at Portage County Board of Development Disabilities in Ravenna, Ohio. Vincent, welcome to the show.
Vincent Valerio [00:00:21]
Well, thank you. Happy to be here.
Janet Courtney [00:00:23]
So Vincent, tell us a little bit about your career and how you became the Director of Education and Children’s Services, and then tell us a little bit about Portage County.
Vincent Valerio [00:00:33]
Sure. Well, it’s an interesting path. I didn’t expect to find myself in this role. If you go all the way back, my formal background is actually in fine art. And I lived in Baltimore, Maryland for about a decade. And I was pursuing an MFA degree there, which I did receive and had a whole second life as an artist in galleries and museums and all kind of stuff. as, yeah, sculpture, a master’s a fine art.
Janet Courtney [00:00:44]
Huh.
Janet Courtney [00:00:56]
Masters of Fine Arts, is that what it was? MFA? Yeah. Oh, me.
Vincent Valerio [00:01:02]
Yeah, and sculpture was my area of choice, which was fun and exciting. A lot of great stories I can share unrelated to what we’re going over now, but as fun as exciting as that is, it doesn’t always pay the bills great. So I was looking for other work and there was a school, specialized school in Maryland that worked with kids on the autism spectrum. And they wanted somebody that had more industry experience to lead their wood shop and help build.
Yeah, they had like a vocational training program and woodshop was one of the trades. And then they also wanted that person to help build all the sets and props for their school plays that they put on. And I said, well, I can do that. I said, I don’t know much about working with kids with autism, but I, you know, I can do that part. And they, they agreed to give me a chance and I learned a lot doing that. And I really loved it and found it rewarding. And then just never left the world and continued to get other experiences, other job opportunities, other,
trainings under my belt until eventually I moved back to Ohio where I’m originally from and now here we are at the Portis County Board of Developmental Disabilities. So it’s been an interesting non-traditional path into where I am right now.
Janet Courtney [00:02:12]
Yeah, so did you have to go back to school then as well?
Vincent Valerio [00:02:16]
So I did not go back to school. In Ohio, there is an alternative administrative license path to get like a school principal license. So prior to working at the county board, I was the official job title was a director, but it was essentially a school principal for a specialized high behavior needs school program up in Cleveland, Ohio. And
Janet Courtney [00:02:24]
Okay.
Janet Courtney [00:02:42]
Mm-hmm.
Vincent Valerio [00:02:44]
And so I went through the Ohio Department of Education and the alternative admin license path to get licensed and credentialed as a principal. Yeah, and did that for a couple of years until I ended up having the opportunity to go over to Portage County.
Janet Courtney [00:02:51]
Gotcha. Okay.
Janet Courtney [00:02:59]
Awesome. So tell us a little bit about what Portage County does.
Vincent Valerio [00:03:02]
Yeah, so Ohio is unique from other states in their developmental disability world. In Ohio, instead of one state government entity that oversees all of disability services, there are individual county boards that are their own governing body that handle it per county. So in Ohio, there’s 88 counties and I work for one of those counties, Portage County.
And anybody in Portage County that would be deemed eligible for services, our job is to help determine that eligibility and provide them the supports they need. So that’s the whole lifespan. Birth to death, we do it all. And my role specifically is with youth. So I work from birth to age 21, essentially. Anybody within Portage County that falls in that age range.
age range typically then falls under my jurisdiction to some degree or another.
Janet Courtney [00:04:04]
So you’re writing policy a lot then, is that correct?
Vincent Valerio [00:04:09]
Well, not so much writing policy. The state, there’s still the Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities that puts out the policy. And then it’s up to the individual county boards to read and interpret that policy and implement it as such. So we have some creative license, so to speak, with how we handle things per county. And then, you know, there’s state mandated services of things that we have to do absolutely at a bare minimum.
Janet Courtney [00:04:18]
Okay. Okay.
Vincent Valerio [00:04:37]
And then there are other things that each county could choose to do with their own local tax levy dollars based on what they feel is needed and beneficial in their community.
Janet Courtney [00:04:47]
So you’re supporting the school districts then.
Vincent Valerio [00:04:51]
My role specifically, yes. So I’m kind of a liaison with the public school districts. In Portage County, there’s 11 public school districts and to some capacity or another, we work with just about all of them. So I provide training to the staff. do crisis intervention training for their staff and behavioral deescalation training. We have a lending library of customized specialized adaptive equipment that we could loan out to schools and classrooms as needed.
We have a variety of outreach service programs that we offer to the school districts. And we also oversee and facilitate a summer camp as well that is available to those in our county. And all these things that I just mentioned, we do free of charge. There’s no fee for the services. It’s paid for out of our local tax levy dollars.
Janet Courtney [00:05:41]
Mm-hmm.
Janet Courtney [00:05:46]
Gotcha, gotcha. Okay. So, so all of the schools are very much aware of the availability and what you have and because it’s at a county level, you can tailor it to each school based on what they need, right?
Vincent Valerio [00:06:00]
Correct. Correct, yes. as far as the communication and making people aware, that’s always an ongoing challenge and thing to do because we, mean, we’ve been, so when I started at Portage County at the time, I wasn’t in the director role. was in a educational services manager was the official title. And it was a new position they created with visions for the future. My job was to kind of plan what the next,
setting years looked like for Portage County and working with youth because some county boards actually run their own specialized schools as well. And that’s the government stuff gets tricky because there’s the Ohio Department of Education and then there’s the Department of Developmental Disabilities which are two separate entities. So you have two different bodies kind of overseeing depending on what you’re doing. And so Portage County used to run a school
Janet Courtney [00:06:46]
Wow.
Vincent Valerio [00:06:56]
program that was geared towards medically fragile individuals. And over the years, for a variety of reasons, the public schools were doing a much better job of helping support those kids in-house. There is another also specialized program in Portage County that supports medically fragile youth. So we didn’t, it wasn’t as much of a needed service. So when I was originally hired, there was maybe only six or seven kids left, which is a classroom, not a school, you know?
Janet Courtney [00:07:18]
Gotcha.
Vincent Valerio [00:07:26]
And so the goal was how can we better support the schools and the youth? What does the community need? And so that’s what I did. I just went out and started talking and shaking hands and introducing myself to all the special services directors in the public schools, getting feedback from them. And then we created all of our new programming and supports based off that feedback. And then the handful of kids that were left either graduated out or we helped them transition with support back into their public school.
Janet Courtney [00:07:57]
Gotcha. So do you provide special education staffing at all? Is that part of what you do or is that mostly held at the?
Vincent Valerio [00:08:05]
We, yeah, we don’t, we don’t actually provide staffing like on a contractual basis to the schools, but I have a team of staff that go out and provide sort of enrichment programming to the special ed program. So for example, we have a social emotional learning curriculum that I helped design and I have a team of staff that will go out once a week to schools that are interested in participating and we will do a lesson.
Janet Courtney [00:08:11]
Mm-hmm.
Vincent Valerio [00:08:32]
with the kids that cover all the social emotional learning topics and standards of learning and whatnot. And then we have other programming that is geared towards transition age kids and helping with life skills and job skills and all that kind of stuff. So that’s a big collaborative effort. I have a transition coordinator on my team and then we have another department where there is a employment coordinator who works with, that’s okay.
Janet Courtney [00:09:01]
Let me write that down because again, this was me not being as prepared as I needed to be. And that’s the beauty of editing is I can. Yeah. Yes. my goodness. Yes. Hold on one second. Let me get my.
Vincent Valerio [00:09:10]
Yeah, I see a good thing you pre-recorded.
Janet Courtney [00:09:18]
She called me just as I was starting to get ready to get it set up and then everything went out the window. about.
Vincent Valerio [00:09:20]
Right. Right.
Janet Courtney [00:09:30]
Okay. Okay. Yeah. So go ahead. Yeah. Sure.
Vincent Valerio [00:09:31]
So I’ll just back, I could just backtrack and start the transition program again. So we also have, you know, transition aged programming as well. And that’s a big collaborative effort. I have a transition coordinator on my team that helps with that.
And then across our agency and other departments, have a staff whose role is an employment coordinator and she works with the community and local businesses to help them be more inclusive as employers and helping hire people with disabilities and works with the case managers, which we call SSAs, which is a service support administrator. She works with them who
and their caseload of individuals and helping them on their path to employment and integrating into the community. So she also helps us with our transition age school programming because she’ll set up business tours so we can take kids on field trips to learn what it’s like to work at different places in the community or community resources like the fire station and police station and going to the library and setting up a library card or setting up volunteer sites where we can get hands-on experience helping other organizations volunteering and getting
you know, practice doing different valuable job skills. So that’s been a really enriching collaborative program. And we’ve had a lot of positive feedback from that because some of the school districts in Portage County are smaller rural districts. They don’t have the same resources and manpower available to get their kids out into the community. You know, not every, some of these smaller rural schools, they don’t even staff a transition coordinator.
Janet Courtney [00:11:01]
Mm-hmm.
Vincent Valerio [00:11:10]
So for us offering this as a free service to them has been a huge benefit for their staff and their kids. The fact that we’ll go with our vehicles and pick them up, take them out into the community. It’s been definitely a beneficial program.
Janet Courtney [00:11:27]
Yeah, sounds like it. And that’s the beauty of county programs like this is that you can tailor it to the needs of that county. What is happening in that county and what do you need there? The needs of the county that you’re at Portage County are not gonna be the same as what they might be in Columbus or in Cincinnati or someplace like that.
Vincent Valerio [00:11:37]
Sure.
Vincent Valerio [00:11:48]
Exactly. exactly. And even within our county, like, you know, our my staff that goes out and does the social emotional learning lessons, you know, what they go over with a middle school class or an elementary class out in Wyndham, for example, which is one of our districts looks totally different than if they’re in Ravenna or if they’re in field because the population is different, the needs of the kids are different. So.
We really tried, when I designed that curriculum, I tried to keep kind of a loose outline that allowed flexibility so that they could customize and tailor it based on the needs of the kids that they’re working with.
Janet Courtney [00:12:30]
Yeah, and that’s the thing I think that people that are not in education do not understand those nuances. Like they see kids and they say, this is the need. This is the need of these kids and all these kids have this need. And that’s not the reality of lots of different districts and huge districts and tiny districts and middle of the road and rural and urban and suburban and just, yeah.
Vincent Valerio [00:12:44]
Sure.
Janet Courtney [00:12:59]
Yeah, fantastic, fantastic that you guys have that. And I love the fact that you’re not just like, this is what we have, so this is what you get.
Vincent Valerio [00:13:06]
Right. Right. No, and this is, I mean, I think this is the benefit of having a county board system the way Ohio does is that every county has the creative freedom to kind of come up with programming and tailor it based on the needs of their population. So everything that I described, my entire department that I direct, this is all elective extra. It’s not a state mandated service. So anything that we do is coming out of our local tax
Janet Courtney [00:13:33]
Mm.
Vincent Valerio [00:13:35]
There’s no state level reimbursement or anything for it. But it’s super valuable and we’re out there in the community. We’re getting people in front of us to understand who we are and what we do. We’re benefiting the staff and the kids that need these services. So it’s definitely important.
Janet Courtney [00:13:59]
Absolutely, absolutely. And so when you’re looking at like the next year, I know you had said you’d done some future planning. What kinds of things do you do you as a professional that’s doing what you’re doing? How do you decide or how do you what makes the cut and what doesn’t make the cut and how do you decide that? Yeah.
Vincent Valerio [00:14:17]
Sure, yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of complicated things involved with what makes the cut or not, but I would say internally we have some different committees where we look at areas of need and determining what our strategies are going to be and how we fill those holes or fill the gaps where they’re needed. Also, as far as the school outreach, we send out satisfaction surveys twice a year to all the schools and groups that we work with.
Janet Courtney [00:14:42]
Okay.
Vincent Valerio [00:14:43]
So we can get feedback from them on what’s working, what’s not working, what they would like to see in the future. That helps us plan how we’re going. But the whole other half of my department that we didn’t discuss is early intervention. So that’s birth to age three. I have a supervisor that handles that. We’re kind of a tag team. So she oversees all the day-to-day of early intervention. That was her world. She knows it in and out. She’s doing a great job. And then as the director,
Janet Courtney [00:14:56]
Mmm.
Vincent Valerio [00:15:12]
I work with her and support as needed, but she’s got that wrapped up. And then I handle all of the day-to-day for all the school outreach. That’s kind of how we work that. But I say all that because one of the things that we identified is there is sometimes a gap in supports for kids in that in-between stage from like three to five. So early intervention services, you qualify for those,
Janet Courtney [00:15:34]
Mm, okay.
Vincent Valerio [00:15:42]
You know, we have specialized trained staff that go out into the homes with the families. They work with the families. It’s a collaborative team approach. There’s a therapist involved, speech, OTPT. And then there is the other service providers as well. And they collaborate. They decide what these kids need in their home. And they work with the families in a coaching model to help the families support those kids kind of.
Janet Courtney [00:16:09]
Mm-hmm.
Vincent Valerio [00:16:12]
pick up and improve on whatever milestones they might have slight delays in. And early intervention is proven to be super beneficial because obviously if you get in early, then it’s less stress on the individual and the system down the road. But one of the gaps we identified is that three to five range because early intervention cuts off at three. Schools sometimes determine they don’t need extra support in preschool and then
Janet Courtney [00:16:22]
Yes.
Janet Courtney [00:16:33]
Mm-hmm. Three. Mm-hmm.
Vincent Valerio [00:16:41]
any potential supports on the school side of things doesn’t really pick up till five. So then we have some of these kids that kind of fall through the cracks that are in between. So that’s one of the areas where we’ve looked at how can we collaborate across departments within the county and find other ways to try to better support that age range.
Janet Courtney [00:17:01]
Yeah, and they’re on an IFSP, right? An Individualized Family Support Plan. Thank you. But then at three, after they turn three and go into the three to five, if they have special education and have been identified, then they go into an IEP, an Individualized Education Plan, correct? Yeah.
Vincent Valerio [00:17:05]
Correct. Support plan.
Yes.
Vincent Valerio [00:17:22]
Right. But some of those kids, even though they qualified and had an IFSP and early intervention, some of the public schools, when they go through and do the ETR and all their assessments to determine if they’re going to be eligible for an IEP, sometimes they say no, that they don’t think they need it. And that’s all obviously sometimes a subjective debate. And there’s other funding things that go into those decisions that maybe all we shouldn’t, but it happens.
Janet Courtney [00:17:43]
So then does it go, mm, yeah. What about MTSS then, Multi-Tiered System of Support? Is that part of what you’re doing with the three to five year olds or is it more like RTI? I mean, they kind of go hand in hand, but what does that program look like for those three to five year olds?
Vincent Valerio [00:18:03]
Yeah, well, we don’t really have a formal program at this point. We’ve kind of identified that that’s a gap. And I know that our early intervention supervisor has worked with our SSA department to try to kind of create a pipeline. So that way, if there are kids at three that they feel like are going to need additional support, they could at least get connected with our service and support administrators and kind of
Janet Courtney [00:18:06]
okay. Okay.
Vincent Valerio [00:18:32]
get the ball rolling to get into our system and have that case management support so they could follow them and support them through the school process if the families are gonna fight for an IEP or whatnot and things like that.
Janet Courtney [00:18:43]
And is that usually done? Like if you’re doing things like that, is it usually done like at the school district or is it done like at home? How are you when what’s your thoughts as far as I know you don’t have it yet and but but you need it. But what is your thoughts as far as like where what does that program kind of look like? Is it? You know, because it because zero to three is mostly at home, right? Or in a in a in a preschool kind of setting sometimes. But yeah, mm hmm.
Vincent Valerio [00:19:09]
Right, right. Some natural setting, right? Yeah. I mean, I think, it would, it depends, you know, if that kid was in a preschool program, you know, we can provide support there. I know, some other counties in Ohio, they have within their SSA departments, they have special SSAs that are kind of an in-between support case manager from early intervention to.
Janet Courtney [00:19:21]
Mm-hmm.
Vincent Valerio [00:19:40]
regular school age case management and they kind of follow those kids along through those couple years, make sure that they’re getting whatever resources and things they could in that time frame, probably in most cases in the home setting and then helping with that transition to school when the time comes.
Janet Courtney [00:19:54]
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Janet Courtney [00:19:59]
Yeah, and then it goes a little bit from just a coaching model to some kind of a blended kind of thing. You’re right in my wheelhouse. So that’s why I’m asking. Because this is stuff that we definitely do and I have done is just, like where does it, you you have that coaching model and it’s so important and helping the parents to understand what they need to do to help their child. But then they get to that three to five and now it’s like, well, now there’s a little bit more of an educational aspect of it.
Vincent Valerio [00:20:11]
Yeah.
Janet Courtney [00:20:29]
You know, what level is this child? don’t necessarily want to put this child on an IEP right at three. Sometimes you have to, sometimes you don’t have a choice, but sometimes, and it’s evident, meaning, you know, it’s like, this is a child that we know is going to need these services, but other kids, you know, they do. And as a speech therapist, these are the kids that sometimes will fall through the cracks and they’ll have an articulation delay or a phonological process disorder.
Vincent Valerio [00:20:41]
Sure, sure.
Janet Courtney [00:20:58]
Here’s the speech therapist again, coming out of me. And you know, if we can remediate that, as long as it’s a developmental problem, you know, at three to five, then they get to kindergarten and that problem’s gone, right? So, yeah. Yeah.
Vincent Valerio [00:21:11]
Right. Right. Yeah, but it’s hard. That’s a hard in-between stage where there’s not clear, there’s not always clear funding and support to provide those services. And if it’s, if it’s just a speech delay, typically a lot of the schools don’t want to jump to an IEP and to specialized early preschool programming because their resources are limited to, you know, and there’s only so many slots and there may be other kids that have more complex needs, you know. So it’s a…
Janet Courtney [00:21:20]
Right. Yeah.
Janet Courtney [00:21:32]
Right.
Mm-hmm.
Janet Courtney [00:21:39]
Yeah, private practice picks up the slack there a lot in that three to five for sure. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I love it because it’s like, I don’t get to do therapy anymore because I’m the CEO and I do the pocket. I just don’t, I can’t do both. It’s like, I can serve 3,800 kids through Lighthouse or I can serve 55 kids as a speech therapist. I can’t do both. So, but.
Vincent Valerio [00:21:42]
Yeah.
Vincent Valerio [00:21:57]
Sure.
Vincent Valerio [00:22:03]
Right.
Janet Courtney [00:22:04]
32 years, it’s just part of my DNA, right? It’s just a part of who I am. And I love that because we do have programs similar to what you’re talking about where it’s the multi-tiered system of support with school districts that have identified that they have this need and we help them. And so it’s really kind of, you’re preaching to the choir with me.
Vincent Valerio [00:22:08]
Sure.
Vincent Valerio [00:22:27]
Yes.
Janet Courtney [00:22:29]
That’s awesome. I think that I’m excited for you guys because it’s you know kids we don’t want kids to fall through the cracks. Nobody does. Nobody wants that. Yeah.
Vincent Valerio [00:22:38]
No, no, of course not. And I think, you know, I think what we’re doing in Portage County is pretty unique with, especially with all of our school outreach stuff. That’s not from our experience and talking with other counties and seeing what their counties are doing. You know, it’s not typical to have that level of extensive outreach programs and collaboration with the schools. They either are running a school program themselves or
Janet Courtney [00:23:04]
Hmm.
Vincent Valerio [00:23:07]
there’s not the same level of school involvement in the way that we have our programming. So I think there’s a lot of good there and we’re just doing what we can to keep it going.
Janet Courtney [00:23:22]
Awesome awesome. So if people want to learn a little bit more about portage, how do they find you?
Vincent Valerio [00:23:31]
Well, they could go to our website. We just did a whole new website revamp to be more accessible. So they could go to portagedd.org and it’ll have all of our different programs and services and ways to get in contact with us. And we’ll be happy to hear from you.
Janet Courtney [00:23:47]
And portage for those of you that are listening and don’t spell well like me is P-O-R-T-A-G-E, portage. awesome, awesome. Well, Vincent, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. I love what you’re doing. Keep it up and just, you know, keep supporting those kids and those schools. They need it for sure.
Vincent Valerio [00:23:55]
Yes.
Vincent Valerio [00:24:09]
We will do our best. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Janet Courtney [00:24:14]
Absolutely.
