2026 ACSA Women in School Leadership Forum

Complaints, investigations, and due process filings are an inevitable part of special education leadership, yet most leaders are not trained in how to respond effectively when situations escalate.

This session provides a clear, practical roadmap for navigating high-stakes situations, including state complaints, OCR investigations, and due process. Presented through the combined perspective of a Special Education Director and a Special Education Attorney, this session demystifies the process and focuses on what leaders need to do in the moment.

Participants will learn how to respond in the critical first 24–48 hours, communicate effectively with stakeholders, and avoid common missteps that increase risk. Grounded in real-world scenarios, this session equips leaders with tools to lead with clarity, confidence, and purpose during challenging situations.

Key Audience Takeaways:
• Clear steps for responding in the first 24–48 hours of a crisis
• Strategies for managing communication with families, staff, and leadership
• Awareness of common errors that escalate conflict and liability

Women leaders are often encouraged to be resilient, but resilience is not meant to be built in isolation.


Educational leadership can be demanding, complex, and deeply personal work. This session creates space for honest reflection about the relationships that help women sustain their leadership over time and offers practical strategies for building stronger support systems that benefit both the leader and the communities they serve.


Learning Outcomes

1. Assess their current leadership support network
2. Participants will identify the relationships that currently provide challenge, encouragement, accountability, and advocacy—and where meaningful gaps may exist.
3. Recognize barriers that can weaken connection among women leaders
4. Participants will explore common dynamics such as isolation, comparison, perfectionism, competition, and unspoken expectations that can make authentic support more difficult.
5. Develop practical strategies to intentionally strengthen leadership sisterhood
6. Participants will leave with ideas and tools for building more intentional circles of trust and support within their schools, districts, and professional communities.

Leave with:

1. A practical framework for strengthening trusted professional relationships
2. Reflection tools they can use immediately within their own leadership journey
3. Concrete ideas for fostering stronger support networks among women in education

Schools are being asked to evolve at an unprecedented pace: strengthen instruction, respond to student mental health needs, increase engagement, redesign learning experiences, and prepare students for an uncertain future. Amidst this change, one essential question often goes unmeasured: How are the adults doing?

Fifteen districts partnered to better understand educator well-being, leadership, and labor-management collaboration as interconnected conditions that shape whether people thrive, stay, and lead forward together. Findings showed that educators with stronger collaboration and support were more likely to recommend their district as a workplace, remain in the profession, and report higher job satisfaction and well-being.

This session explores how collaborative leadership practices can strengthen educator resilience, reduce depletion, and create conditions for sustainable change. Participants will hear from district and labor leaders about the realities and successes of collaboration; reflect on how personal and organizational values shape decisions during stress and change; explore strategies to strengthen trust, communication, and shared accountability; and engage in a listening and reflection protocol they can immediately use with teams and colleagues.

Participants will leave with practical tools, reflective protocols, and research-informed strategies to strengthen relationships, sustain teams, and cultivate systems where educators and students thrive together.

Women in educational leadership experience high levels of stress due to gender bias and demands of the job. In a 2026 Women Leading Ed survey, 92% noted stress as a significant problem and 80% conveyed their work-life balance as poor. The focus will be on positive ways to mitigate the effects of job-related stress–compassion fatigue, secondary trauma, and time as a limited commodity–on one’s health, outlook, and productivity through intentional and systematic self-care.

Women leaders are valuable assets and role models, and it is imperative that we keep them healthy and in the position for the long-term (Pennicooke, 2020). Practicing self-care can be beneficial to ensuring their well-being, and can better position them for success and for maintaining optimum health throughout their careers. Additionally, 93% of teachers requested support for wellness from their administrators, and less than 33% of leaders felt confident to do so (Alpaca, 2026), and could therefore benefit from this presentation.

This session will spotlight self-care as a healing-centered approach that can help women leaders to be proactive and to take positive control of their well-being. Participants will learn about, and be engaged in different types of self-care activities. Our women leaders will leave with their own plans, coping strategies, a commitment to implementing daily self-care, and ways to ensure that their staff and coworkers are also attuned to practicing wellness in the workplace and at home.

This hands‑on workshop teaches participants how to design, launch, and sustain a monthly Girl Boss Dinner—an inclusive, low‑cost peer networking dinner that cultivates mentorship, sponsorship, emotional support, leadership practice, and measurable career advancement for women in school leadership. Participants will leave with a ready-to-implement plan, tools, and practice in facilitation and outreach. By the end of this session participants will be able to:

1. Build a squad that turns casual conversations into supportive alliances
2. Decouple mentorship without bureaucracy
3. Momentum to advocate for each other out loud!