Inclusive Education Benefits

Dohn Hoyle, Partners in Policymaking Faculty Member, Activist and Organizer
18. Inclusive Education Benefits
Put on sessions where people would talk about what it meant if their child was included. And parents would invariably tell you their child was now invited to birthday parties. Not a birthday party at the school where the classmates were bused in from different places, but in the neighborhood where their school was at a child's house. They would talk about what it was like to be greeted in the store as So-and-so's mom as opposed to Mrs. So-and-so, or not being greeted at all. But if the other people in your class were from spread out across the county or the community, and not in your neighborhood, but if you went to neighborhood school, now all of a sudden people knew you as So-and-so's mom, and you weren't just some stranger. And your birthday party had people without disabilities from the neighborhood, not just only people with disabilities in your class. It was real important for parents to hear some of those stories and to learn what difference it made in lots of ways. And they not wanted to make sure that the IEP goals were met, even though it was in a, include classroom.
They wanted to make sure that all these things were so, and they didn't lose anything in the process of doing this. So, we'd set up panels and have those people on them. What we learned was, there was an important part of the panel we missed from the beginning. We finally put in other students who didn't have disabilities on the panel. And they talked about what it was like to have So-and-so in their classroom.
All the myths about what they aren't gonna like it 'cause they're gonna take time away from them, and they're not gonna like the noise this person makes, or the fact that they stand and twirl, or they're not gonna like this, they're not gonna like- didn't mean a damn thing, no. When you ask kids without disabilities about their classmates, they talk about they have curly hair, they talk about they have cute sister, they would talk about, and to get 'em to even talk about the chair that somebody used, you have to point at it and say, "What about the wheelchair?"
"Oh, that's really neat." "He let us ride in it the first day." You know, I mean there was none of this, there was none of this thing the parents fear about their child being different or having these kinds of, almost never talked about the attributes that child had which was disabling. They talked about other attributes that were more like attributes they had. So that was an important part of what we ended up having to fit into the panels of people we'd have up there in front to have people come listen to. Some of the organizing we did included efforts that, parents' efforts to pick up school board meetings, and so on and so forth.
And, the underestimation that we participated in and how entrenched current practices would be was tremendous, in the beginning. We learned relatively quickly that the old adage that if it never gets on the agenda, it never happens. And boy, they can keep things off the agenda no matter what the hell you do. So I, a part of my lessons as an organizer is learning that there are times and places we have to do something drastic. I'm not a, nobody's ever accused me of being passive or any of those kinds of things, but I learned really quickly that these elected officials, school board members are elected in Michigan and in New York state, that elected officials aren't very responsive to the electorate if they have something to hide or gain or whatever, but that they can be accessed other ways.
I talk about inclusive education only in the sense of, you know, when you're a parent, and you're in the education system, and you're up against all that minutia day by day, dealing with that, it gets lost. This is preparation for the rest of the person's life. This isn't about tomorrow, or getting 15 more minutes of speech therapy. This isn't about the IEP or those kinds of things. This is about what in there is gonna prepare them for adult life. And, I think that's lost both on parents and on the system many times, because it's so much about you as a parent worrying about tomorrow and what's gonna happen to my son or daughter.
And you don't think the 15 years ahead or the 20 years ahead, or whatever it is that you need to think ahead about what's this going to accomplish in the end. And, such an entrenched, ingrained system that you have trouble disrupting that enough to get attention paid to the outcomes. I'm not a fan of Special Ed. I think the idea is tremendous preparation for adult life, but the implementation has been thwarted in so many ways.