Area school counselors and other professionals in social services, criminal justice, education, medicine and related fields will be trained this week to conduct a family violence prevention program.
The two-day workshop, Thursday and Friday, July 22 and 23, will train more than 50 professionals in the Adults & Children Together (ACT) Against Violence Program developed by the American Psychological Association to build parents’ positive, nonviolent discipline techniques and help families handle behavior problems.
The training will be from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days and will be held in the Springfield Local Schools’ administrative offices, 6900 Hall St., Holland. Participants in this Helping Parents to Prevent Violence: The ACT Parents Raising Safe Kids Program workshop will become part of a network of more than 3,000 ACT Against Violence professionals across the country.
“Research has shown that the ACT program has the potential to decrease or prevent children’s aggressive behavior as well as family violence in families with young children,” said Dr. Michele Knox, a clinical psychologist who is a University of Toledo associate professor of psychiatry and director of the ACT Great Lakes Regional Center.
Knox will present at the workshop along with Dierdre Washington, assistant manager of prevention education at Harbor Behavioral Healthcare, and Donna Dickman, director of the Partnership for Violence Free Families.
Thursday morning, 9 a.m. to noon, will cover children’s behavior and how children learn violence, and following a lunch break, the afternoon session, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., will focus on resolving conflicts in a positive way. On Friday, the morning topic will be positive discipline and teaching alternatives to corporal punishment, with the afternoon focusing on media violence and children and helping parents raise nonviolent children.
The popular workshop, which is funded by grants from the Verizon Foundation and the Metlife Foundation, is at capacity.
For additional information, contact Knox at 419.383.3815 or michele.knox@utoledo.edu.
