RI CEC Con

Last weekend I had the chance to attend the Rhode Island Council for Exceptional Children conference. When I went, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The conference focused around working with students who are either special needs students and students with emotional struggles. I try to be open minded when it comes to working with students with special needs. I currently tutor a boy who may qualify to be in a separate special needs classroom with only ten other students, and I’ve heard from him that he hates the idea. The boy I tutor told me how mean students can be to “those kids” and basically said that there is a horrible stigma behind students with special needs. He is right. This conference helped me to recognize the stigma even more and see the need to fight against it.

At RI CEC Con there were two keynote speakers who spoke together about their work at the Henderson School in Boston.They described the importance for special needs students to be included in regular classrooms not only for academic growth, but for personal growth as well. They noted how happy their students were to be with “normal” peers rather than be separated like outcasts. This made me think of Skip, the first deaf student who attended my high school.

In high school everyone would be considered “normal” in the eyes of society. Very few students had IEPs and there were no students with significant needs. When I was a junior, my school accepted their first deaf student, Skip, who would then attend the school with his interpreter. The first year for him was hard because no one knew ASL and he relied on his interpreter, but his second year at my high school they introduced an ASL class and students were able to talk with him without help from his interpreter. Skip was also an honors/AP student who received many scholarships when he graduated.

Skip was an example of how the stigma we place on special needs students is often very wrong. Just because he needed a little extra help to understand the class lecture, didn’t make him a low level student. I have known many people who are ADHD, autistic, and dyslexic who were very intelligent and were able to do well in school. Some of them were blessed with the opportunity to be integrated into a general ed classroom, but not all were. The students who were put in separate classrooms told how miserable it could be and how peers looked at them differently.

Nikos Giannopoulos, one of the speakers at RI CEC Con and Rhode Island’s 2017 teacher of the year, spoke about trauma within the classroom and what we can do for students. Though he focused on students who may have hard struggles at home or a bad history, he noted that students just want to be understood and know they are in a safe place. This applies not only for students struggling with trauma, btu special need students as well. They need to know that they are welcomed in a general ed classroom and that their teachers are there to help them. One of the things that made Skip happy at my high school was that even though he was “the deaf student,” he was still just like everyone else and he knew he fit in.