By Deacon James N. Dunbar
FALL RIVER, Mass. — Breaking the ice to become an inclusion school and bring support services to children with disabilities rather than moving the child to the services, came readily at St. Stanislaus School.
“I have listened to parents who thought they could not send their child to a Catholic School because of his or her disability and the heartbreak it caused,” said Jean Willis, the principal.
“Now I am seeing how grateful those parents are,” said Willis, who initiated and developed the program this year that serves 28 children spread over the 10 classes from pre-k through kindergarten and up to grade eight with such disabilities as Down’s syndrome, major speech delays, autism, and a variety of learning disabilities.
“For all of us at St. Stan’s, we feel that a Catholic education is important to all our children, and it is imperative we take steps to make sure that happens. Families can’t do it alone,” she added.
Father Bruce M. Neylon, pastor of St. Stanislaus Parish, heartily endorses the program, which makes his parish school the only one with it in the Fall River Diocese. He said it reminds him of the special education efforts at Nazareth Hall where he was chaplain from 1975 to 1982 while serving at Holy Name Parish.
“I saw at that time how meaningful it was to give special education help to those with Down’s syndrome, and others, and how the young people advanced because of it,” he said.
And what also sparked him and Willis to take up the inclusion school format came in the person of Ashley Banalewicz, a charming eight-year-old, who has Down’s syndrome and is currently in the second grade at St. Stan’s.
“She came to us three years ago as a kindergarten student, providing us with a challenging experience. In her few years here she has advanced wonderfully,” reported Willis.
“Children like Ashley offer unconditional love to their peers, their teachers, all of us, and it has a great effect on children around here to be loving as well,” Father Neylon noted.
“We can also see how more compassionate all the students have become since we became an inclusion school,” Willis added.
Inclusion is a term that expresses commitment to educate all children to the maximal extent appropriate in the school classroom that he or she would otherwise attend.
To do that, St. Stan’s hired Colleen Hauser, a graduate of Bishop James Hartley High School in Columbus, Ohio, which is an inclusion school.
A 2008 graduate of Dominican University in Illinois where she earned a degree in special education, Hauser is in graduate studies at Providence College in the Providence Alliance for Catholic Teachers and is pursing a master’s degree while teaching in her day job.
Hauser explained how the special needs students are taught within the framework of their own classroom.
“The teacher, for instance, in a mathematics class continues to teach according to her lesson plan. During that class I then meet with, say, one to three perhaps of the special education students in that classroom with a one-on-one approach. I do not bring a new curriculum. What I do is to assist those students to better understand what they have already been taught and help them to catch up.”
It also means working with the classroom teachers and reviewing teaching resources and professional materials; working with the various teachers’ aides; and with the family as well.
Hauser’s busy schedule has her meeting her special needs students throughout the grades three times a week — “except for Ashley,” she said laughing.
“We meet every morning before school to do exercises, and my time with her is truly one on one … and during the day she searches me out from time to time,” Hauser noted.
Father Neylon said the idea of an inclusion school plan is endorsed by the Vatican, and called attention to a Dec. 8, 2008 talk given to the United Nations by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, C.S., Holy See permanent observer to the UN agencies in Geneva, on the occasion of the 48th international conference on education.
Here’s what Archbishop Tomasi said: “An inclusion education embraces all children and youth in their existential context and all persons dedicated to their formation, a comprehensive process that combines transmission of knowledge and development of personality. In fact,” he concluded, “the fundamental questions any person asks deal with the search for meaning, of life and history, or chance and dissolution, of love and transcendence.”
While it is not a new concept for Willis, a veteran in special education, having taught autistic children for six years in the Westfield School System, she looks to learn more.
“I’m intending to travel to Ohio and observe the special needs program that is running in some of the parish schools in Columbus, in order to find the best ways and means to make our program grow,” she told The Anchor.