Just a Regular School for Everyone

The Mary Lyon School is a “full-inclusion school” designed to give students — especially those with special needs, including emotional and behavioral disabilities — the necessary resources and supports to see positive outcomes with their education. The Mary Lyon School uses community-based approaches and philosophies rooted in inclusion to stay connected with students and their families to help guide them toward their graduation day.

The Phoenix School of Discovery is an alternative school designed for students with learning and social challenges, with roughly half of students on an individualized education plan, or IEP. The school prioritizes hands-on learning, has multiple teachers in each classroom, and offers accommodations like sensory-friendly lighting and a space for “quiet lunch” for students who find the traditional cafeteria over-stimulating.

Batibot Early Learning Center is a progressive daycare center that offers “socialized tuition” based on what families earn, making it easier for lower-income children to access early childhood education. The center enrolls 25 children and prioritizes hands-on support and therapy for children with developmental delays.

Nebraska’s Journey to Inclusion program focused on providing educators with training and resources to help schools keep more students with disabilities in general classrooms rather than separating them in specialized classrooms. Since implementing changes, the state has seen proficiency rates and graduation rates rise among students with disabilities.

The Teaching at the Right Level program, or TaRL, provides tailored lessons in reading and math to primary students in Borno, grouping them by their level rather than their grade or age for engaging activities designed to build their literacy and numeracy skills. When it was first piloted, the number of students able to read a simple paragraph grew from 14 percent to 45 percent, while the number of students able to complete subtraction problems grew from 11 percent to 59 percent.

To help address falling enrollment and families’ lack of child care, Brooklyn Charter School extended the school day to twelve hours, providing before- and after-school activities and meals. So far, 80 students have signed up for the expanded hours and the school’s enrollment has rebounded from pandemic lows.

The Anam New City School, a tuition-free school that serves children in remote villages in southeast Nigeria, helps support its operating costs by cultivating crops and livestock on the school grounds. About half of the agricultural yield is used to provide meals for students, while the remainder is sold to fund administration costs.

In an attempt to provide ease of movement to girl students while playing, Valayanchirangara primary school introduced "gender-neutral" uniforms for all its 756 students that eliminated the earlier requirement for them to wear skirts. It has since inspired several other schools in Kerala to similarly change their uniforms and snowballed a movement, supported by the state's education minister no less, where more such measures to promote gender equality in schools are being encouraged and adapted.

A teacher in San Diego took matters into her own hands when she couldn't find a social justice curriculum tailored to students with disabilities. That’s partly why she created what she calls the “Social Justice League,” a group of students at her school who meet weekly by Zoom and discuss a variety of issues, such as Native American land, gender privilege, the representation of disabilities in the media and systemic racism.

Since implementing a “science of reading” curriculum, Sharswood school has seen its reading scores jump, with 43 percent of all students scoring proficient or advanced and and more than half of third grade students meeting the mark. Teachers says a big factor in the successful implementation has been the flexibility to tailor resources to each classroom and the support of an onsite literacy coach.