Grace makes inclusion model for other schools

INCLUDING STUDENTS: Kim Scuito, a fourth-grade teacher at the Grace School, works with student Yolanny Estevez. The division of Meeting Street works toward an inclusive approach for students with disabilities. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
INCLUDING STUDENTS: Kim Scuito, a fourth-grade teacher at the Grace School, works with student Yolanny Estevez. The division of Meeting Street works toward an inclusive approach for students with disabilities. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Some Rhode Island public and private schools are fully inclusive for those with and without special needs, but the private Grace School, a division of Providence-based nonprofit Meeting Street, provides inclusion in a way even the state considers “unique.”
“The Meeting Street model for the Grace School, which includes students with severe disabilities supported by funds from their school districts as well as [nonspecial needs] students paying tuition to attend, is apparently unique in Rhode Island,” said Elliot Krieger, spokesman for the R.I. Department of Education. “It’s a creative model of service that can meet the educational needs of a very diverse group of students.”
Special-needs students are not segregated from their more typical peers, says Margaret Knowlton, Meeting Street’s head of school for both the inclusive Grace School and the Carter School, which focuses on students in grades 6 through 12 with pronounced special needs. The possible exception, she said, is when students get attention for a particular therapy goal that doesn’t lend itself to being worked on in the classroom.
“In the Grace School, for students with and without disabilities we think they can learn with and from each other, [so] they’re not ever segregated,” Knowlton said. “All their content and curriculum is taught in the same classroom and all of their special subjects – art, library, music – are all done together. So they’re with each other all day.”
At the Grace School, this academic year’s crop of 91 students is comprised of 31 students with some range of special needs for which an IEP (individualized education program) is necessary, and 60 “typical” kids without those needs, who nonetheless benefit from teaching tailored to them individually, said Knowlton and Amanda McMullen, Meeting Street chief operating officer. One of those “typical” kids is Yolanny Estevez, 10, of Providence, whom Grace officials say is at the top of her class. Her mother, Yosmary, said she learned of the Grace School through a friend and wanted for her daughter the respectfulness and solid education that she believes her friend’s daughter, now 13, acquired by going there.
In addition, Yolanny has become a leader, demonstrating an “understanding and acceptance” of special-needs students.
“She’s learning from them and is also teaching them,” her mother said. “She has a lot of friends with special needs and what I can see when I go to the school is: [those students] are looking for her, and that makes me so happy. She looks at them the same way [as she looks at students without special needs.”
The student-teacher ratio at the Grace School is another plus, Yosmary said, since her daughter has benefited from the close attention from reading teachers to improve that skill.
“We staff [classrooms] pretty high,” said Knowlton: typically four adults with 15 kids. There is one special-education and one general-education teacher for small group and individualized as well as classroom instruction, as well as, on average, two teachers’ assistants, she said.
Tuition is $65,000 a year for special-education students referred from their districts to the school, while tuition for students without special needs, who are placed based on applications made by parents, is $8,700 a year, she said.
The Grace School this fall will add sixth grade, and in subsequent years add grades seven and eight – a change envisioned when the school started, Knowlton and McMullen said. Meanwhile Carter, which is not inclusive and has grades six through 12, will eventually become a special-needs high school with grades nine through 12, they said. •

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