New Meeting Street site designed to be a model
Kindergartner John Toth considers classmate Alexandria Simoes his girlfriend, and the fact that she has a feeding tube doesn’t bother him at all. At Meeting Street, students with and without disabilities are used to learning together; the school works hard to make it seamless.
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Founded in 1946, Meeting Street has been recognized internationally as a pioneer in educating children and young adults with profound disabilities and developmental delays. “Inclusion” – educating students with and without disabilities together, not separately – is central to its work.
“We look at kids with disabilities as the last form of segregation that’s still out there,” said John Kelly, president and CEO of Meeting Street. “The kids always got it. Kids don’t have a problem with other kids.”
Now, after moving into a new campus in South Providence, the $7,900-a-year private school is about to expand its use of inclusion. The extra space at the new facility will allow the school to increase its use of full inclusion, practiced in its preschool and kindergarten for 10 years, and gradually move toward full inclusion through eighth grade.
“We saw this as a natural progression,” Kelly said.
The $15 million facility, six years in the planning had its official opening on Jan. 8. Built on acres of land at Thurbers Avenue and Eddy Street, 40 percent of which will remain green, it features a 76,000-square-foot building – nearly twice the size of the old school, in East Providence – with a cafeteria, a gym and a pool and more space for classrooms and therapy rooms.
The new campus has been named the Meeting Street National Center of Excellence. It is meant to be not only a top-notch school for the 1,700 children and young adults whom Meeting Street educates and supports each year, but also a hub for research and training and a professional-development model for educators and therapists.
Even the school’s construction is meant to be a model. Administrators took great care with the design to assure that it was optimal for inclusion – with wide ramps replacing stairwells, for example, so classes will never have to separate while moving about the school because some students are in wheelchairs.
Inclusion is by no means unique to Meeting Street. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that students be educated in the “least restrictive environment” that can meet their needs. And over the years, more and more students with disabilities have been brought into mainstream classrooms across the nation, where teacher’s aides and pull-out programs provide the extra support they need.
But children with severe disabilities are, for the most part, still educated in separate classrooms. Many of the students at Meeting Street are there because their local school districts believe they can best be served in a specialized school; all tuition for special-needs students is paid by their home districts.
Yet in its Bright Futures child care program and preschool, and its kindergarten classes, Meeting Street has implemented full inclusion even with more-disabled children, and it has been found to be very beneficial to all the students, Kelly said.
“We don’t realize it, but peer modeling is huge,” he said. “Kids are picking up on that from under age 2. So a disabled child is learning from other children, ‘This is how I pay attention, this is how I take a turn.’ Because you have a child with a disability, you baby and pamper them, which is good, but it’s not good academically. Kids need to be pushed.”
Heidi Simoes, Alexandria’s mother, said inclusion has been wonderful for her daughter.
“I chose Meeting Street School because it was an inclusive program,” she said. “Even though she has special needs, I feel she shouldn’t be isolated from typical peers, and I think peer role models help them. It’s very important to me that my daughter is in with students that are typically developing, because she has the ability – she just needs a little extra help.”
Simoes said she is also impressed with the way students interact at the school.
“The kids have accepted her – and John [Alexandria’s ‘boyfriend’] totally sees beyond that [feeding tube],” she said. “At first they asked what it was, and they were told it was her medicine, and they don’t even care now.”
Maureen Toth, John’s mother, agreed about the social benefits of inclusion.
“I think the inclusion model has helped him develop nice characteristics as a person,” Toth said. “We’ve seen him look at every child as the same.” John “just doesn’t see” the wheelchairs, she said, and Alexandria’s feeding tube is “no big deal” to him. “He never would get that anywhere else.”
Kelly said the desire to instill empathy in a child is often cited by parents of typically developing students as a reason for choosing Meeting Street. But the academic benefits their children will receive are also a deciding factor.
Although at most schools, only children with special needs are given individual learning plans, at Meeting Street, every student gets one, and it’s tailored to each child’s style of learning. In addition, the classes are never larger than 15 students, and each usually has one teacher, two teacher’s assistants and another assistant who is shared between two classes.
Toth said she has seen what that extra attention and help can do. She said John has mild sensory integration issues – sometimes misdiagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or attention deficit disorder (ADD) – and the school is helping him overcome them.
“We’ve seen him self-regulate and calm himself down and tolerate loud noises that he couldn’t before,” she said. “It built a good foundation for him to succeed anywhere.”
Additionally, according to Kelly, the students have been testing at 10 percent above the national average in math and language skills, and have been found to have higher self-esteem and motor skills than their counterparts in non-inclusive classrooms.
Kelly attributes the scores and the increased self-esteem in part to the teaching that the typically developing students choose to do. “You learn more by teaching,” he said. “And these students are getting an opportunity to be mentors and coaches.”
The improved motor skills, he attributes to the students’ watching, and sometimes participating in, the physical therapy their friends are getting. “They are kids, and if one is doing something, the others will want to do it, too.”
Kelly said that he knows some parents of typically developing students will still shy away from inclusion, but eventually, he hopes it won’t be that way.
“We have some families who would never consider the model, and we don’t hear from them,” he said. “But children with special needs are pitied and stigmatized, and we’re just trying to get back to the idea that they’re just kids.”
