Kennett High School Graduation 2008

Last Friday my son, Dylan, graduated from Kennett High School.  As president of the school board, I had the honor of speaking at the ceremony and of giving my son his diploma.  Here is the text of the remarks I made at the ceremony:

Members of the class of 2008, seated around you are an extraordinary group of people who have loved and supported you longer than you can remember.  If you turn and look you should see parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins—family members whose love for you is unconditional.  Can you find them?  See if you can find friends and members of the community who have known you and watched you grow.  Do you see them too?  They’re all here tonight to support you, so why not give them a big round of applause to say thank you for all they have done for you.  

Thank you seniors, I’ll get back to you in a moment.  First I want to have a word with your parents.

If you are the parent of one of these seniors, then we have something in common because I’m also the proud parent of one of the graduates here tonight.

Fellow parents, let’s consider a few things:

The pomp and circumstance of tonight’s ceremony symbolizes the fulfillment of the preparation of our children for life.  They sit here tonight as young adults, ready to make their way into the world.  To this point they have followed similar paths, at least in terms of many of the things they have done so far.  They have grown up in the same community, played together as toddlers, and gone to school together as children and teens.  They’ve ridden in the same shopping carts at Giant, been to birthday parties together, and sat next to each other on field trip busses to Harrisburg and Washington.  As their parents, we hope that they will experience great happiness and success as adults, but also we hope they’re prepared to face the trials and tribulations they are sure to encounter. 

We hope for these things because it is clear that, beginning tonight, the paths our children take will most certainly diverge from those of their classmates.  Think about it.  Beginning tonight they will start to accumulate experiences that are unique to them—they will head off to different colleges, they will establish themselves in a variety of different jobs and careers, they will move away from Kennett Square to different parts of the world, they’ll get to ride in shopping carts at grocery stores other than Giant…no, wait, I mean they will push their own children in shopping carts at grocery stores other than Giant.  This, my fellow parents, is a good thing, because it suggests development of a human spirit that is independent, adventuresome, and adaptive. 

Our students have also followed similar paths through their formal preparation for this event.  The building behind me is not only the actual place where much of that formal preparation took place, it stands here tonight, as it should, as the unique local version of the institution of  public education that has touched and shaped their lives.  Whether these graduates spent all 13 years in this school district or just a portion, they arrive at tonight’s ceremony having fulfilled all the expectations and stipulations placed upon them for the granting of high school diplomas so they can be ready for whatever college or career or whatever they have chosen for themselves.  This my fellow parents is also a good thing, something each of us should be thankful for.

And so, members of the class of 2008, this brings me to you.  I want to show you something I found.

This…is my high school diploma.  I received it 33 years ago this week in a ceremony in front of my high school in Pennington, NJ on a warm June evening, an evening, as I recall, that was punctuated by torrential rain.  And while this little leather hinge is cracked from old age, the diploma inside seems to be just as pristine as it was the night I received it.

I got to thinking about what the diploma inside means, what it stands for, how it helps in life, and what it might get you.  Here is what occurs to me:

• First, and most obviously, perhaps, this diploma is a certificate that verifies that you have completed, as mine says, the “course of study prescribed by the board of education.”  It tells all who need to know that you are ready for whatever is next—careers, community service, college, whatever.  Your intellect, your affect, and your physical being have been developed according to what has been prescribed by the collective effort and wisdom of the Kennett schools. 

• Second, it represents a set of experiences that will forever bind you together as the Kennett High School class of 2008.  No matter where you go or who you meet, it is very likely that the bonds you have developed and the experiences you have shared with each other will be some of the most important of your lives.  I hope that as you make your way in life you will strive to come together with members of your class as often as possible to celebrate and commiserate all that life is throwing at you.  For me, doing so with my high school classmates over the years has been a very satisfying thing to do indeed.

• Third, without this diploma, the “congratulations graduate” shrine on the mantle in your living room will be lacking it’s center piece.  Your parents need this diploma for later when your family and friends gather around to celebrate your accomplishments.  You, of course, will wish you were at parties with your classmates, striving to create the sorts of bonds I talked about before.  But, back at your house, many people will pick up your diploma, read its contents with pride, and place it  back in the display as carefully as possible.

• Finally, the diploma represents your ticket to the next ride in life.  The fact is, you will likely use it to gain entrée into whatever comes along next.  And then as you embark on these next endeavors, whatever and wherever they are, you will gain new knowledge and expertise, and add new experiences all of which will gain you access to the chapter in life that comes along after that.  The high school diploma you are about to receive is the document that gets that whole ball rolling.

So graduates, you are about to receive a document that will certify you to the world and solidify you as a group, one that gives your family and friends cause to celebrate and your community assurance that you can fit in and contribute.  That is as it should be.  As an official of this school district, I am proud of all of you.  As a parent, I am particularly proud of one of you.

Least Restrictive Environment

The other day I participated in a least restrictive environment (LRE) needs assessment in the Kennett Consolidated School District (click here). I was invited to participate (a) because I am the parent of students in the district, (b) because of my role as school board president, and (c) because I am a professor of special education. It was attended by special and general educators from the district as well as administrators and other parents (including a mother of a young man with autism), and was facilitated by two inclusive practices facilitators from the Chester County Intermediate Unit.

We spent the first portion of the day examining data on how well the district does with regard to including students with disabilities according to criteria associated with the Gaskins ruling in Pennsylvania. Put simply, Gaskins uses, as a prime consideration of inclusive education, the actual percentage of time a student with disabilities spends in general education settings, ostensibly working on the general education curriculum. The second part of the day allowed us to develop an action plan to address needs we identified as a result of our earlier examination of the data.

During the first hour or so of the data examination phase of this process I bit my tongue off nearly a dozen times as I listened to comments made about inclusive education, vis-à-vis Gaskins, that ranged from humorous to ridiculous to downright inaccurate.

On the humorous side was a question about whether or not we ought to count the time students with disabilities spend in the hallways moving from one class to the next as inclusion. More ridiculous was the notion that somehow it is more inclusive to have students with disabilities, regardless of how severe, sitting in high school academic subjects alongside their peers without disabilities. And the reason given for why we send some of our children to out-of-district placements is because it is impossible to provide them in district schools with specially designed instruction that is appropriate for them was, well, just plum wrong.

We have a legal requirement to place students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment. This has been a cornerstone of all the iterations of the federal law pertaining to special education (as of late, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, originally the Education of All Handicapped Children Act—PL 94-142). The model that has been used to operationalize this requirement is the “continuum of services” described by Evelyn Deno back in the late sixties and early seventies (for a time reference, PL 94-142 was signed into law in 1975).

In a nutshell the model suggests that we maintain a linear array of educational services and placement options, ranging from regular class placement to institutional settings, so that we place student in an inclusive a setting as possible, on the one hand, but so that they get the services they need on the other hand. The problem is that one doesn’t have to move far down the continuum from the general education setting end before one is removed totally from the general education classroom or even the neighborhood school building. The reality for students with severe disabilities who are placed along the continuum is that, since the more intense services have become associated with the more restrictive settings, they almost always find themselves clustered in far-flung, segregated, center-based school settings.

The reason I bit my tongue off so often was that the continuum of services with its implicit acceptance of a deficit-oriented approach to human disabilities will always be incongruent with inclusive education. Think about it.

Rather than a continuum such as Deno’s, we ought to consider a model in which we support students with disabilities, not along a continuum of any sort, because that would always mean pigeonholing students with unique needs, but by designing and implementing idiosyncratic supports for students with disabilities within the context of the general school community.

This isn’t easy. It means we would need to change many things about the traditional way we go about public education. We would need to re-think a lot about the way we conceptualize schools and schooling. How will things need to change for us to move away from the continuum of services, a decidedly linear model, and towards one that is more three dimensional?

Take a stab at that question and I will tell you why we shouldn’t measure inclusive, supported education by timing students with disabilities in the hallway, or why inclusive education isn’t necessarily about students with more severe disabilities spending time in high school Biology, or why it is wrong to think that we can’t support the needs of our students with more severe disabilities at home in our own district schools.

What do you think?