I want to start out by just letting everyone know how AMAZING this year has been for our self-contained special education students. While in my three years here at Stout I have always felt my students have been accepted as a part of the Stout community this year has been particularly wonderful.
By including our students into the general education gym classes the amount of peer interactions has increased immensely! Students now identify more with my students, call my students by name, give out high fives, and walk up to my students and initiate conversation. These interactions were more rare in my first two years at Stout but are the ones that count to my students the most. My students walk down the hallway and can point out multiple general education students they call friends. This warms my heart more than I can explain.
While students with cognitive impairments or any other impairment may sound, talk, look, or act different they want to be treated with respect and have the same interactions with their peers as any other child their age would.
Our school has been so accepting of our students and I feel that the general education population would like to be informed about the following. SPREAD THE WORD TO END THE WORD DAY!! Please read the below to your A/A students on March 4th, 2015 and have a healthy conversation about what it all means and what they personally think –
Have you heard about the “Spread the word to end the word” campaign?
The R-word is the word ‘retard(ed)’. Why does it hurt? The R-word hurts because it is exclusive. It’s offensive. It’s derogatory. The campaign asks people to pledge to stop saying the R-word as a starting point toward creating more accepting attitudes and communities for all people. Language affects attitudes and attitudes affect actions. Pledge today to use respectful, people-first language. (www.r-word.org)
What is people-first language? Often when we identify individuals with disabilities we identify them by their disability first. ALL people want to be identified as just that – PEOPLE first. It is more acceptable to refer to someone as an individual with a disability instead of a disabled person. Always put the person before the disability because we are all people before our challenges.
These are a few short clips from the website I thought might impact our students. Feel free to check out the website and choose a different one if you think it would make a bigger or better impact.
03/02/2015