On September 18 in Atlanta, Georgia, the State Bar of Georgia hosted a day-long training on FASD for judges, attorneys, social workers, addiction professionals, and other legal, child, and disability advocates. The training was presented by Atlanta Legal Aid, Southern Center for Human Rights, Georgia Office of the Child Advocate, Georgia Advocacy Center, Georgia Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), NOFAS, Georgia Appleseed – Center for Law & Justice, and The Arc of Georgia, and was organized by FASD advocate and family member, Melissa Jacobus Cook and William Edwards, a member of the NOFAS Board of Directors and a Deputy Public Defender in the Mental Health Court in Los Angeles, California.

Cook and Edwards developed the training and recruited the sponsors and Cook organized conference details and contributed funds to pay for the meeting expenses including the handouts and lunch for the nearly 200 attendees. She also offset travel costs for out-of-town presenters and hosted them during the training.

Presenters included Edwards, Doug Waite, MD, also a member of the NOFAS Board of Directors, the Medical Director of the Keith Haring Clinic at Children’s Village in New York, and an American Academy of Pediatrics FASD Champion, Larry Burd, PhD, Director of the North Dakota Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) Center and FAS Clinic, and Paul Connor, PhD, a clinical neuropsychologist in the Department of Behavioral Sciences’ Fetal Alcohol and Drug Unit at the University of Washington and in private practice where he conducts evaluations in both clinical and forensic settings.  NOFAS President Tom Donaldson moderated the training.

Kathleen Dumitrescu, a staff attorney with Atlanta Legal Aid’s Disability Integration Unit specializing in children’s issues, helped to coordinate the training and offered remarks to open the program. She introduced the Honorable Mary Margaret Oliver, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, who prior to her public service was a Magistrate Court Judge and visiting professor at the Barton Child Law and Policy Center at Emory University.

As part of the program, Cook participated on a panel sharing her personal and family experiences raising children living with FASD. She was joined on the panel by Sarah Forte, a senior investigator with the Southern Center for Human Rights where she investigates death penalty cases at the trial level and in post-conviction proceedings, Molly Millians, D.Ed, a clinical educational specialist with the Emory Neurodevelopmental Exposure Clinic in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Emory School of Medicine, Judge Tom Rawlings, the Interim Director of the Division of Family and Children’s Services within the Georgia Department of Human Services, and Judge Peggy Walker, a Juvenile Court Judge in Douglas County, Georgia, and past President of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.