Leading for All: How to Create Truly Inclusive and Excellent Schools

by Jennifer Spencer-Iiams

Members of the collaboration group have also shared their stories with the school board to help our citizen leaders understand the power and promise of inclusive practices. This has been particularly important as the board has heard concerns from other community members about students who exhibit disruptive behaviors in class.

Or they could've joined the board 😂

Special education is built on the premise of the parent-district partnership, and we need to live into that vision.

We found out that the fire department did not know that we had students with complex needs attending all 16 schools in the district (because it had not occurred to us to tell them).

Ummm... Have we told our fire dept?

You can’t do it all at once. But you can begin to take steps and set processes in motion that will have an impact across your organization. And you can’t do it all alone. Build a core team of partners who will be allies in the work. It starts with belief—understanding your Why and helping the people around you find their Why.

There are some specific areas of inclusive practices that we are moving our attention toward now. Streamlining school transportation, desegregating early-childhood education, increasing access to college, rethinking teacher education programs, and partnering with the mental health system are some of the important emerging areas of focus for our work.

Transportation is one of the most segregated aspects of our school system. Many school leaders have not questioned why it is so segregated or even considered that it could be structured differently.

what if school transportation was made up of different vehicles (large and small) and different routes (longer and shorter) and these were created planfully with students’ individual needs in mind but without the stigma and segregation of the current system?

we were immediately confronted with the absurd inefficiency (and inequity) in the fact that two different buses would be coming to Arden’s neighborhood: one regular long bus to pick up his brother and friends and one small lift bus to pick up Arden in his wheelchair, alone.

YUP. This played out every day in my neighborhood. It was awful trying to explain why Jax rode a different bus.