Citizenship in School

The article “Citizenship in School: Reconceptualizing Down Syndrome” by Christopher Kliewer talks about the importance of having students with special needs in the same classroom with students who do not have special needs.

It states that “the challenge is to erase negative attitudes about people with developmental disabilities, get rid of stereotypes and break the barriers for people with disabilities.” I think that this quote is very true, some people have very negative views of people with disabilities, when in reality there is no reason to have such a negative connotation. Some people with disabilities can have such vast knowledge on certain subjects; for example, there was a boy in my high school who had some sort of disability, but he loved reading. He was constantly reading and was able to excel far beyond anyone in our English class, because he could retain the information he read immediately and genuinely loved every book we would read. I think it is important for classes to have disabled and non-disabled students because “many of us have a certain level of control over who we meet and interact with, none of us can come close to claiming complete control.” If children never have the experience of having and working with disabled children in their classrooms, they could have false ideas about people with disabilities. If a child is able to have experience with someone with disabilities at a young age, later in their lives I think that they are more likely to be accepting and have a better understanding about people with disabilities. The article stated that “acceptance is the aim when children with Down syndrome join their nondisabled peers in classrooms, and many school and individual teachers have entered into this effort.” One school I know of that does this is the Meeting Street School in Providence they have all inclusive classrooms. I learned about this school a couple of years ago and it was something that really interested me because in the schools that I had attended never had disabled students in the same classroom as nondisabled students. The link tells a little bit more about Meeting Street School and what they aim to do: http://www.meetingstreet.org/AboutUs/AboutMeetingStreet/tabid/142/Default.aspx