The third and final session of the Mindful Paraeducators’ Lead to Succeed program was held Wednesday morning at West Creek Academy in Valencia.

The educational program was led by Roma Khetarpal, a Santa Clarita resident, small business owner, mindful parenting expert, educator, speaker and author.

“This program is mostly attended by Saugus Union School District school employees that work with our special needs students and a few other district staffers,” said Sue Guinn, Student Database Systems Technician for Saugus Union School District (SUSD).  

Wednesday’s session was the third of the three-part program focused on district employee’s communication skills when working with students.

“The paraeducators program is a pilot program launched here at Saugus Union School District, so this is the very first of its kind. Assistant Superintendent Dr. De Armas, and Sue, and their whole team came together and asked me because we’d done the campus supervisors first– which was first launched after my parenting book with Dr. Joan Lucid four years ago.”

Previously, Khetarpal had run another program for the school district, Mindful Play Leaders’ Program for Campus Supervisors.

In one portion of the program, attendees were asked to speak about the impact of the techniques shared in previous sessions.

Common responses from staff members across a variety of roles included increased trust from the students, increased patience with students and better communication with students.

The program covered a variety of topics over the three-hour session including leadership, the power of touch, breathing techniques, among others.

Khetarpal partnered with Mallika Chopra, daughter of Deepak Chopra, to provide free copies of her book “Just Breathe” to those in attendance.

The book is geared towards children and how to use breathing techniques to positively impact their state of mind.

Chopra pre-recorded guided walkthroughs of three of the techniques from the book, which those in attendance tried for themselves.

Additionally, at the close of the session, Khetarpal also provided free copies of her book “The ‘Perfect’ Parent: 5 Tools for Using Your Inner Perfection to Connect With Your Kids” to participants.

“What fills my heart with joy and perhaps even makes me tear up a little bit is that what started as a pilot program here with Saugus Union School District four years ago has now impacted close to 40,000 children,” said Khetarpal. “What more could I have asked for to align with my passion of helping adults with tools to interact with children and build those communication tools, because I feel like the biggest disconnection we have with the next generation is via communication.”

In the spirit of building communication tools geared towards the next generation, Khetarpal hopes to bring her programs to the wider world through the power of technology.

“I’m in talks with a couple technology platforms online so that we can do this in a more efficient way,” said Khetarpal. “After all there’s one me and my small team here, so really to be able to scale this, where this year our goal is to research and have discussions with technology platforms so we can do this more efficiently.”

To learn more about Khetarpal’s work, visit her website here.

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