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This sums up the concept.

School is a place where a child is sent to fulfill the educational wishes of the parents and schools often forget this one very important point. The schools with whom we have dealt for the past two decades have long since abandoned this reality and embraced the concept that ‘it whatever the administration has decided that is of greater priority.’

Educating all children with disabilities in a regular classroom, regardless of the nature of their disability is the primary goal and objective of the inclusion concept.

This does not mean send the child and their disability to school and let the school figure out how to make it succeed or fail. What this means is develop a set of goals to achieve over the course of a day, a week, a month, several months, and over the course of the school year.

Next develop the methods that will best accomplish these goals and objectives.

The reasons that this system works is precisely because the school setting is providing all students enhanced opportunities to learn from each other’ contributions.

If you look back over your own education you will see that it is usually the events and conversations that happened in the playground, lunch area, and after-school programs that more shaped your social life and social appropriateness than any of the classroom lectures or homework reviews.

In order to best integrate a child into a classroom the primary objective must focus on the person who will be participating in the class with a disability. This focus should be to improve the life of this person so that they function as a socially and age appropriate participant at all times. That is as a parent you must make your wishes known from the very beginning that you have no intention of making your child a valedictorian of the Down syndrome set.

In the orthodox Jewish schools it is common for the administration and the faculty to be so academically oriented that they will continually come back and say things like, “but she should be doing so much more academically,’ or ‘it’s just not fair that we aren’t giving her more to do,’ etc.

The reason for this is that there is no room for typical children to be sitting in the classroom merely to pick up tips and hints as to how to best be accepted by their peers. This is an alien concept in this milieu.

In order to best facilitate these inclusionary methods it is first very important to provide the proper sets of supports for the regular teachers, administrators, et al, by providing the time, training, teamwork, resources, and strategies that will be necessary to properly integrate such a program in the school.

You must assure the administration and the faculty that you have all of the above either available or a better system is to solicit the school to participate in locating those parents and professionals who have the skills to provide these supports.

Primary to the inclusion process is that the “Inclusion” student follow the exact same schedule as the typical students in their grade level.

In order to best implement these schedules the “Inclusion” student should be in all age appropriate academic classes. This is accomplished by developing an adaptive curriculum that is designed to be a parallel set of objectives that allows for full participation with a minimum of obvious distraction.

This is the job of a special educator whose specialty is adaptive curriculum. This teacher/consultant can also develop and help implement curriculum for extra curricular activities including but not limited to art, music, physical education, field trips, assemblies, productions, study groups, etc.

These students should have complete access to all areas of the school including the library, cafeteria, playground along with the typical students in the school.

Rather than creating a friendship circle it is better to create a circle of friends. That is not to say that a community organized fellowship to provide chesed is not a good thing because it most certainly is however more important is to develop a circle of friends who are not in the students life for a few assigned hours but rather for life.

Friends are so important to children who have disabilities and handicaps because one of the causes of early adolescent depression is ‘silent telephone syndrome.’ Children with Down syndrome who become teens and observe their peers receiving phone calls and invitations to participate in social events begin to feel excluded. Desperation morphs into depression and depression only gets worse.

“Inclusion” should foster friendships that will be lasting between typical students and special needs students.

Thus the presence of the special needs child in the entire educational process has a positive impact upon the typical children in their classes in that it fosters the understanding of human differences at an early stage of life.

Ask yourself how many children with disabilities did you have in any of your classes in school when you were growing up. The answer will directly correlate to how you feel about your child being exposed to a special needs child in his or her classroom.

Children do not have to be taught how to accept another child no matter what their challenges. Difference based bias is taught it is not innate.

It is extremely important that the school take the parents wishes seriously. As mentioned above many schools have a difficulty with this since there is a territorial protective behavior on the part of the administration with the school and the teacher with the classroom.

And finally in order to provide the best inclusionary education it is extremely important that everyone who will be involved with the teaching of the special needs student be provided with a current IEP (Individual Education Plan).

There are many key participants who help develop and IEP and we will be discussing what an IEP is and who the key team members are who input this document in the coming weeks.

Schools need to be reassured as to their roles as well and yet it is important to collaborate together as a team, parents with teachers, therapists with teachers, parents with administration, paraprofessional with classroom teachers, therapists, and parents.

As mentioned above careful planning and an equal division of responsibility is the key to success. It should not fall entirely on the parents to provide all of the services and the school should also not expect to be so burdened.

Teamwork and collaboration are the two most important methods that when employed lead to success.

“A mind is like a parachute, they only work when they are open!”

In the public schools the term “Inclusion” refers to a concept that allows all children of all races, religions, and creeds as well as handicaps and disabilities to matriculate in the same classrooms without regard for their unique differences while simultaneously providing all of the supports to make this successfully happen. It is a school wide philosophy that offers everyone an opportunity to fully participate within the neighborhood school that they would have otherwise attended if it were not for the fact that they were born with some unique difference that at one time would have excluded them.

In the orthodox Jewish school system it is basically the same conceptually but the common denominator is the children’s specifically orthodox Jewishness as students.

The various levels of acceptance allowed for within the orthodox Jewish schools often depends upon several unique differences. These are the foundation for either full participation within this method of acceptance or not.

Helen Keller once said, “it is not being blind that is the true life challenge but rather the lack of vision.”

It is exactly this lack of vision that is the barrier to a “barrier free environment.”

Principals and administrators are exceptionally creative when they want something and equally if not more so when they do not.

When our daughter first applied to her neighborhood elementary school she was merely progressing from having spent two exceptionally successful years in a fully included pre 1A class in the Pre School. Her ascent to elementary school should have been a smooth, effortless, and seamless transition yet it was not.

The school began by excusing themselves from allowing our daughter from riding the bus with all of the other children. The creative excuse was that the insurance does not cover such special cases. “What if she falls or is not wearing her helmet?” we were asked. “But she does not have falling issues and she has never worn a helmet in her life other than to ride on the back of a bicycle,” we incredulously responded.

After a quick check with the Board of Education we found to our delight and to the disappointment of the School administrator that his creative exclusionary tactic was exactly that. We also discovered that it is against the law to exclude any child from fully participating visa vi an insurance policy.

Several days later the administrator found out that our daughter was on the bus and called indignantly inquiring, “didn’t I tell you that our insurance doesn’t allow for your daughter to ride the bus?”

So with our daughter securely included in the bus transportation from home, which allowed her to travel to and from school, we began our eight year battle to have her fully included in the class and school.

The school’s resistance was often based upon such simple excuses as the teachers are barely qualified to teach the typical children in the classroom to we first have to locate a teacher willing to take on such a difficult situation.

If the teachers themselves are treated the way they are spoken about in these schools then this is one of the reasons that there is a resistence to acceptance and inclusion.

We found that it was often the teachers who were asked to be more professional and put up with administrative abuses rather than the other way around. The administration was not always professional with the parents as the faxes that I have saved from more than a decade ago indicate.

In reviewing those faxes we were commanded not requested to comply with administrative wishes. We still offered to fully participate in developing a fully inclusion-any/visionary educational program. To that end we brought in Dr. Stephen Levy, who served as the very first inclusion principal in the New York City Board of Education and is considered one of the top 5 experts in this type of education in the country.

Dr. Levy’s school had a population of over 1000 students and a 10% population of fully included students. Steve’s goal was to speak with every single student at least once each and every month. And he succeeded for the entire duration of his tenure. This included the “Inclusion” students as well.

Dr. Levy and I made several presentations together for the State of New York Department of Special Education annual conferences on the concept of inclusion within the orthodox Jewish school systems. These sessions were always well attended and well received. Our information and concepts were based upon our participation in over 15 separate orthodox schools who had fully included children within their classrooms up to that time.

Dr. Levy made many suggestions that would have allowed for an expanded fully inclusion-any education system in our daughter’s school.

One of the great advantages to having a special needs child included in the classroom(s) is that there is an increased likelihood that there will also be an occasional special educator who will visit the classroom.

One of the significant problems facing the classroom teacher today is their inability to find and identify the silent segment of educationally challenged students in their classroom. And if they do stumble upon a problem finding or developing a solution is even more difficult. So often these children go undetected.

With the introduction of Special Educators to assist in developing the adaptive educational methodology, we felt that the school, by taking advantage of this offer for inclusion would afford the classroom teachers an opportunity to improve the overall level of pupil success.

When the special educators begin to observe the classroom for the purpose of providing insight into how best to include the special needs child they will also notice certain delays or difficulties other children are experiencing that can easily overcome due to their expertise and ability to suggest solutions.

The problem was ‘lack of vision.’

The administrators, who themselves are not as secularly educated as the professionals whom we were offering were always on guard and defensive as to what could be allowed and what would absolutely be forbidden.

This barrier was always the under current of resistence and the obstacle to full success. Whenever the Board of Education would send a team out to the school everyone would go into a frenzy. This was as a result of this insecurity.

As long as we were willing to do all of the work from the outside and provide all of the supports without asking for any real changes to the classroom environment then we would be allowed to stay.

Despite the fact that the concept of inclusion became progressively more and more wanted within the school faculty which was obvious from the additional number of teachers who were increasingly volunteering for inclusion duty the program became increasingly more difficult.

The primary reason that the difficulty level continued to increase is because the entire school faculty as well as the entire community at large was beginning to see the benefits of “Inclusion,” despite the fact that the administration was still raising the same frivolous objections from year to year.

These objections after eight years became so annoying, to us, that at one meeting at the end of the seventh year in order to assess the following year’s classroom we came to an explosive realization, these seers have no vision and this program, as successful as it was, was doomed. This was another meeting filled with all of the sensitivities of fingernails on a blackboard while simultaneously picking away at a scab.

For eight years the school experienced a continual increase in its student body with three fully included students (all of whom had Down syndrome). However today that school has a decreasing population of students and no “Inclusion program” of any kind without a special needs program of any consequence.

This was a school who had fully 35 professionals, therapists, and specialists, at no charge to the school, who attended the beginning of school planning sessions only to find themselves being held at an arms distance and fighting to provide what could have been a school standard that would be sought out from around the globe.

We finally gave up trying to deal with the administrative fears and insecurities.

However in the course of the next few posts I would like to explore some of the more successful programs and how they are concomitantly increasing in their “Inclusion” program development.

These are schools and programs whom we can all admire and applaud for their foresight and insight.