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Making legal U-turns from outdated principles and practices to better serve students with disabilities
Today, when trying to find our way to an unfamiliar destination, many of us rely on global positioning systems, or GPS technology. "Recalibrating" and "Whenever possible make a legal U-turn" are now ubiquitous phrases in the audio backdrop to many of our car trips, the modern-day road map. Before embarking, we set our GPS and let it guide us through our journey, checking it often to be sure we are still on course to reach our final location.
We can think about modern-day inclusive education in similar terms. The programming decisions we make to serve the 6.1 million school-age children with disabilities in public schools nationwide serve as our global positioning system in creating and maintaining truly inclusive schools. These children ask us to examine the question "Are we there yet?"
The two of us have worked with hundreds of schools and districts across the country on inclusive policies and practices. Federal law has mandated inclusion of students with disabilities since 1975, contributing to schools that are much different places today. Yet many schools continue to use outdated models of inclusion, segregating students with disabilities in separate classrooms, wings or buildings.
One District's Approach
Is the destination of inclusive education within reach today?
"We did inclusion." "We have inclusion rooms." "We tried inclusion." We hear these phrases from educators everywhere. Yet authentic inclusion is not something that exists only for some kids in some classrooms. It is not an experiment. It is not something that happens sometimes, with students removed for therapies.
Inclusion is a way of seeing the world. For schools, inclusion is a guiding philosophy that prompts educators to work together to ensure every student is a full and permanent member of the general education classroom and school community. This begs the questions "Is this even possible?" and "How do schools and districts get to this point?"
We can look to places already doing this work. In Wisconsin, the 1,300-student Harüand/Lakeside School District committed to creating an authentically inclusive district during the 2008-09 school year. The district began with an equity audit, which found students with disabilities were facing a variety of inequities, ranging from achievement to opportunities.