Air Tag

When I picked up C today she took a sharp right instead of continuing out the door to our car. This is a common occurrence, whether at the end of the day or during her school day. She darts down the hall and ducks into one of the classrooms where she is a regular unannounced visitor but not an enrolled student. The classes down this hallway include Food and Nutrition, Woodworking and Computer Science/Robotics (a particular favourite). We can’t know for sure what her motivation is for this roaming but my theory is that she feels she deserves to go to these classes as much as the students who occupy the desks and tables and seats inside, so she takes it upon herself to go.

C is a student in a segregated Life Skills class at one end of this hallway. Her Life Skills teacher told me that everyone in the classrooms down the hallway likes C and most of the time she just goes in and sits for a while then leaves. But there are times when her uninvited arrivals are disruptive to the learning that is taking place.

My question is how can we include C in one or more of these classes so that she can be what she seems to want to be: one of the students genuinely involved in learning there? I have been easing my way into asking this question with the relevant parties, taking my time establishing relationships before attempting to rock the boat. This is what we do as parent advocates – the dance of taking action towards more while also trying to maintain positive relationships with the folks that hold our kids’ education in their hands. But today I had an exchange with Mr. Y, the Computer Science teacher, when I went to retrieve C from his class, and it made me think that it might be time to make a move.

Mr. Y had some ideas about how to make C’s visits to his classroom more engaging for her. Ideas that would give her an opportunity to interact with the materials in his classroom when she visits. He gave her the “air tag” pictured here, which is a generic version of the Apple product folks use to track their belongings. He suggested she could wear it with her talker, which she carries cross-body in a waist pack, and when she comes to his class he will have a device that she can tap it on to “check in”. As she tried it out with a huge grin on her face, listening to the satisfying beep it made, a thought bubble formed above my head that said “This is what it looks like for a teacher to take the first steps onto the inclusion bus”. My (inclusion bus) wheels started turning.

C went right back to her Life Skills class to show the teacher her new device and I shared with him the sense of possibility I had from meeting Mr. Y. I wasn’t sure if he was catching on yet but to me it’s clear that this could be the start of something. This spark of interest in inclusion could be fanned into a flame if we don’t let it die. This little blue generic air tag that doesn’t look like much could be a key to something that looks a bit like high school inclusion.

To Be Continued…