In-Focus features a staff member each month as a way to learn more about the incredible professionals we have across CIP.
We asked Judy a few questions about her role, her CIP experience, and what she does when she’s not at the center.
What’s your most memorable CIP experience?
There are so many! They include negotiating with a guy at a parking garage near NYU’s Langone Medical Center when we realized the CIP van wouldn’t fit into the regular lot’s entry gate before a Think Positive panel event (!!!); and an assortment of meaningful 1:1 academic sessions with students at CIP and BCC.
It was an honor to serve as a delegate from CIP Berkshire in this first year of CIP’s Diversity and Inclusion Council. Throughout my adult life, I’ve been deeply committed to trying to understand and support the rights of all people’s points of identity
What have you most learned in your time at CIP?
How important it is to use different approaches at different moments when working with students, out of an awareness of their emotional state, what they are thinking about and striving to accomplish, and wherever we are working together.
How has CIP helped you grow in your career?
After teaching for 25 years in classrooms at a middle school, a high school, and 2 colleges, and even more years of independent tutoring, working at CIP allows me to utilize that knowledge, training, and experience in individualized work with our students who have autism, LD and other diagnoses.
What’s your favorite thing about working at CIP?
Using everything I can to try to make a difference every day while always being true to myself.
Tell us a fun fact about yourself.
I am hilarious in a David OR Moira Rose from “Schitt’s Creek” meets “Wallace and Gromit” sort of way.
Is there anything your colleagues don’t know about you that you’d like to share?
I was the first person in my family to go to college, I am an only child, and I was raised by parents who deeply loved animals and going up north (in Ontario). All of that deeply shaped me, as has being my daughter’s mother.
