The Haring Center has been working with dozens of schools throughout Washington at various levels of developing more inclusive practices, Leon-Guerrero said. Districts and schools involved in the development program are scattered throughout the state, including Northshore, Highline, Spokane, North Thurston, Kittitas and Bellingham. This often requires system-wide change, including rethinking schedules and how schools use their existing resources, she said.
For example, specialists continue to work to accommodate Ruby Bridges students, whether assisting in the classroom or stepping out momentarily to do one-on-one work, but those work times are folded around the students’ main lessons rather than at a set time every week.
“But it might be that they’re not missing [their classrooms] during core instruction time, or … that services are coming to them,” Leon-Guerrero said. “That needs flex spaces and not them moving to meet adult schedules.”
Ruby Bridges also has resource rooms where instructional assistants and special-education teachers can step aside with one or more students during a lesson to help them navigate specific needs. That assistance can range from reviewing a new concept to supervised physical activities that could help a student regain focus.
“The biggest difference between traditional classrooms and inclusive classrooms is that traditional classrooms are very reactive. So we kind of wait for students to struggle before we then provide them additional support. Inclusive classrooms are really built on the assumption that learner variability exists,” she said.
For example, a science teacher who knows that their class has students with varying levels of reading skill would create lessons with that in mind.
“I can proactively plan for other ways to make that information accessible. Maybe I can provide a video, maybe I can provide an audiobook version of the text or my district test software that will read the text aloud to a student,” Waldron said. “I’m not waiting for the student to show me on a test that they don’t understand the concept. I’m being proactive in my approach to making sure that students can access [it].”
These practices help students at all levels, Waldron argued. While the percentage of students who qualify for education accommodations has remained pretty stable over the past decade, the most recent measurement scores for grade-level reading and math show that many students might need additional academic support after returning from remote and disrupted learning.
“You can’t deny that students came back into school full-time with a wide range of learning needs that they did not have before the pandemic, and that the number of students who needed additional support grew from before the pandemic,” Waldron said.
