Serving Special Needs Students in Philadelphia.

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    Some critics of Catholic education protest that parochial schools do not serve children with special needs. While many Catholic schools clearly do lack the resources (but certainly not the will) to provide fully for special needs students, schools that do have such programs frequently are at the vanguard of special needs pedagogy.
    This is especially true in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, where Cardinal Dougherty High School and Our Lady of Confidence Day School have blended in a unique configuration that has enhanced the educational and Catholic mission of each school.
    Built in 1954 to serve special needs children, Our Lady of Confidence (OLC) eventually outgrew its original facility. Principal Sister Francis Christi Beck, SSJ, also recognized that the social and emotional needs of the older developmentally challenged students would be met more fully if they could be integrated into a high school setting with normally developed adolescents their own age. Sister Francis Christi observed that special needs pedagogy now "emphasizes much more physical movement and general mobility as well as interaction with a wider group of same-age peers," which was not possible in OLC's original building. Dr. Elizabeth O'Donnell, assistant superintendent for special education for the archdiocese, agreed. In the fall of 1997, she and Sister Francis Christi met with Father Paul Kennedy, president of Cardinal Dougherty High School (CD), to explore the possibility of integrating the older OLC students into CD in a novel school-within-a-school configuration.
    Cardinal Dougherty High School was an ideal site. The student body was split evenly between females and males. With students representing 38 countries, it is racially and socio-economically diverse: 52 percent of the students are white, 21 percent are African American, 17 percent are Latino, and 10 percent are Asian. Its administration and faculty had a history of innovation, with the school developing numerous cutting-edge programs over the past few years. In 1994, CD was the first high school in the archdiocesan system to initiate block scheduling (Momentum, February/March, 1996). In addition to its traditional academic curriculum, CD, was also the only Catholic high school to offer its students two creative, career-oriented academic programs--the Medical Careers Health Academy and the Catholic School Teachers Academy.
    Within this tradition of academic and administrative innovation, the CD community looked forward to working with the OLC community. To prepare the CD faculty and students for the arrival of the new students, Sister Francis Christi provided assemblies and workshops, highlighting the OLC students' special needs as well as their unique gifts. For the 1998 fall term, CD welcomed 48 OLC students, aged 16 to 21, into the building.
    The OLC students are taught in self-contained classrooms that have state-of-the art computers and a life-skills room with ovens, sinks and laundry facilities. The students, whose challenges range from Down syndrome and hearing-impairment to hydrocephaly and several forms of developmental delay, follow a functional curriculum that emphasizes life-skills. These include cooking, washing, cleaning, counting, keyboarding, classifying, shopping, and refining personal health and hygiene. They are taught by three full-time, certified special-education teachers supported by three full-time assistants.
    Depending on the nature of their respective needs, the students are served by seven therapists: occupational, music, physical, vision, mobility, learning and speech. A part-time job-experience teacher provides additional instruction to help students move from practicing skills to actual work. The overall curriculum prepares students for basic-level employment in nursing homes, hospitals and similar housekeeping settings.

OPPORTUNITIES TO INTERACT
    Throughout the school day, OLC students have multiple opportunities to interact with CD faculty and students. For instance, they share the second lunch period with CD students and, like their CD peers, have the responsibility of clearing the tables after their meals, which they buy in the school cafeteria or bring with them from home. Teaching assistants monitor the students during their lunch. The students also attend assemblies, whose topics range from multiculturalism and substance abuse to musical concerts and sexuality education--topics that can clearly benefit many OLC students because they, like their CD counterparts, are still forming their own self-concepts and identities.
    One of the highlights of the school year is the Garnet and Gold Spirit Day, when the entire school community participates in activities designed to foster school pride as well as social interaction. Here the OLC students are invited to share in relay races, pep rallies, musical chairs and game shows. During competitive games, the special-needs students are matched with one another, but in all other activities they are included with CD students.
    Our Lady of Confidence students participate in schoolwide eucharistic celebrations as well, with selected students as altar servers. Throughout the school day, OLC students wear uniforms similar to those of their CD peers, but they wear their own insignia, which contributes to their sense of inclusion underscoring, in a positive way, their uniqueness. Similarly, they have their own graduation, with specific awards and prizes. They join the CD seniors in the school auditorium for a common Baccalaureate Mass.
    While the special-needs students exhibit a range of physical and mental challenges, most are so markedly challenged that full-fledged inclusion into CD's academic curriculum is practically impossible. However, this does not mean that the two groups of students never interact in the classroom. CD faculty members have been creative in providing OLC students opportunities for social and cognitive stimulation.
    For example, students in Francis Rauscher's English class composed essays about several OLC students, who were then invited to class where the CD students read their themes aloud. That activity nurtured self-esteem, self-concept and mutual understanding among both groups. For the CD students, it further underscored the subtle interplay between rhetoric and audience. Selected students also visited Sister Maria Virginia's related arts class. By participating in drawing activities, they improved their hand-eye and motor coordination. Bohdan Solonynka's biology was another favorite class where OLC students observed simple scientific experiments and looked at hair strands through microscopes. But few classes competed with Mr. Carl Yeckley's environmental science class, where the students made cotton candy for their OLC visitors.

BOTH GROUPS LEARN
    In these examples, the activities clearly were learning experiences for both groups. Father Ronald Ferrier, a physical science teacher, often constructed mini-lessons specifically for the higher-functioning OLC students, which he presented during his prep period. Always hands-on and experiential, these covered science topics from weights and measurements to magnetism. In the science lab, the students puzzled through why magnets would be drawn to certain metals but would not stick to their own bodies. For the next week, they were intent on measuring and weighing every physical object they could find.
    Many of these classroom experiences stretched some students to think, in modest ways, beyond their current levels of projected ability--to move, as described by L. S. Vygotsky, toward the limits of their own zones of proximal development (Tudge, 1990). This occurred most often when CD students worked one-on-one with their special needs guests. These contexts for learning were always engaging, always non-threatening, and, most importantly, designed to incite the joy of learning. From the students' reactions, this was certainly the case.
    During the 2000-01 academic year, the special education teachers, on an ad hoc basis and almost as an experiment, cycled a few students into Sister Joanne Mongelli's music class, where occasionally they took piano lessons. Several students also sat in on low-level mathematics classes. One student, Christopher Grant, was in an English I, track 3 class throughout the spring term. He observed, "I have been extending my mind" and "have met a lot of new friends."

BEST BUDDIES A BIG SUCCESS
    Although students from both schools have profited from such classroom interaction, the Best Buddies program has offered opportunities for the greatest number of CD students to interact with OLC students. The program is part of Best Buddies International, founded in 1989 by Anthony K. Schriver. Its purpose is "to enhance the lives of people with mental retardation by providing opportunities for one-to-one friendships and integrated employment" (www.bestbuddies.org). At CD, the Best Buddies program occurs after school every Thursday when a student pairs up with, and is responsible for, one OLC student.
    Christina Nicolo, president of Best Buddies at CD, explained that an advisory group of students and faculty meets weekly to plan activities that range from indoor soccer and basketball to playing board-games and going for a snack at McDonald's. Tim Smink, a CD student who is hearing-impaired, finds working with OLC buddies especially gratifying. Tim noted that consistent mentoring is essential in helping OLC students "get prepared for working and living in the 'regular' world."
    Tim Lebold, a CD football player who has been a Best Buddy for two years, assisted his buddy write copy for a personally made Christmas card and mentored another buddy who became an equipment manager for the football team. According to Tim, working as a Best Buddy "has helped me understand myself better." It has been an "incredible experience" that should be part of every high school student's program. Echoing these points, Christina Nicolo added that the program helped "everyone become more accepting of all people and more willing to get to know other students within both the OLC program and CD itself."
    Best Buddies has been a remarkable success at CD and it has grown exponentially since its inauguration in 1998. Father Kennedy explained that during the first year of the program 30 students volunteered; 60 volunteered during the second year and more than 120 during the past school year. Because there are only 56 special needs students in the school, the 120 volunteers are rotated by semester so they can all be matched with one buddy for at least one term.
    Besides Best Buddies, the Medical Careers Health Academy and the Catholic School Teachers Academy provide additional contexts for students to work with their special needs peers.
    The Medical Careers program introduces students to more than 20 health professions, in addition to medicine and nursing. These include athletic trainer, dental assistant, pharmacy technician, emergency medical technician and environmental health aide, to name a few.
    Medical Careers students visit the training rooms where OLC students serve as clients. Throughout the semester, CD students keep a record of their client's height, weight, temperature, blood pressure and respiration. For the CD students, this is a multi-faceted learning experience because they come to appreciate the challenges, faced by many specialneeds students, of untying and retying their shoes before and after getting on a scale, and the challenge of keeping a thermometer under their tongues. The CD students develop confidence and expertise in using medical instruments, and OLC students gradually overcome their fear of medical checkups.
    The Catholic School Teachers program offers students opportunities to enroll in college-level education courses, taught by college faculty, which can be applied toward their B.A. degree and teacher certification once they are accepted at a participating university.
    Once more, the special needs students are clients. As part of their introductory education courses, students are introduced to types of human impairments and developmental delays. Through observing their special needs peers, they appreciate more fully the dynamics of these challenges, as well as the limitations of categorizing and labeling humans, which can narrow an educator's expectations of any pupil's ability and achievement.

STUDENT VOLUNTEERS
    While these formal programs provide forums for students to interact socially and cognitively with their OLC counterparts, students who work or who have other after school commitments cannot share these experiences. Many of these students, however, become volunteers during the school day. Because of the school's block schedule, most students take four courses each semester, with each period lasting 82 minutes (verses the traditional 42-minute period). This schedule allows students to engage course material more deeply through rich, student-centered activities. Some students take only three courses each semester, and many of them choose to volunteer to assist their OLC peers during the open block of time.
    Diana Van Thuyne, a special education teacher at OLC, stated that the volunteers cook with the students, helping them follow recipes and operate ovens. They also accompany the children to a local supermarket, where they help them find items and guide them through the checkout aisles. And because the functional academic curriculum can be especially challenging for the OLC students, the volunteers assist them in playing money and time games on the computers and in helping them match words (e.g., "telephone," "no smoking") to picture signs.
    Mrs. Van Thuyne observed that a few of the CD volunteers are low functioning, track-3 students themselves. She believes that many of these students struggle with their own curriculum. When they work with the OLC students, their own confidence and self-esteem are enhanced. Mary Harkins, principal of Cardinal Dougherty, agrees. "Because some track-3 volunteers become frustrated in their own courses, they tend to have greater patience with the OLC children, which is a true gift in itself," she said. She added that some open-block periods occur at the end of the school day and students who are not scheduled for class may leave. However, many of the students who could go home stay and work with the special needs students.
    The CD-OLC partnership has influenced everyone in both schools, from administrators and teachers to students and non-professional staff. Mrs. Harkins said that the entire community has become more understanding, tolerant and compassionate. Cardinal Dougherty students and faculty directly involved with the Our Lady of Confidence students have gained a deeper insight into the teaching-learning process which, for many, has led to more productive teaching and more meaningful learning.

EXPANDING THE CONCEPT
    The success of the school-within-a-school model prompted the archdiocese to expand the concept. In September 2000 Archbishop Carroll High School in Radnor, Pennsylvania, was paired with St. Katherine's Day School in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, with Carroll as the host school. Dr. Elizabeth O'Donnell commented that, like OLC, St. Katherine's needed additional space to accommodate its growing special needs population. It also recognized the social and educational benefits that would result from combining with Archbishop Carroll. From the outset, Dr. O'Donnell said, Archbishop Carroll's faculty welcomed the arrival of the St. Katherine's students. This acceptance was affirmed by the Cardinal Dougherty faculty, which produced an unsolicited, signed endorsement of the program. David Beck, a social studies teacher at CD, hand-delivered the endorsement and addressed the Archbishop Carroll faculty, explaining the fine points of the program and suggesting ways that the Carroll community could expand the experiences of the St. Katherine students. By all reports, after the first year at Archbishop Carroll, the combined program has met and exceeded expectations.
    Dr. William Damon, director of the Stanford University Center on Adolescence, explained that one's moral development is a lifelong process that hinges on the on-going interpenetration of four components: self-under-standing, social cognition, moral judgment and the moral sentiments (Damon, 1995). Cardinal Dougherty's course of study, and especially its religion curriculum, offers students constant opportunities to nurture and refine these four components in the context of Christ's Word. Yet the interactional web provided by the CD-OLC integration animates these four elements even more dramatically. Cardinal Dougherty students gain insight into themselves as well as develop heightened sensitivity to the needs of others. Equally important, through working with the specially challenged, students and faculty alike stir their moral sentiments or moral emotions, resulting in deep, personal satisfaction and compassion. What better way can a Catholic school assist its entire community to realize fully and personally Christ's message of compassion and charity towards all humankind?
ADDED MATERIAL
    Francis J. Ryan, Ph.D., is professor of American studies and education at La Salle University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (ryan@lasalle.edu). For additional information about Cardinal Dougherty High School, visit www.cardinaldougherty.org.
Opposite page: Father Ron Ferrier shows Jason Concepcion, Jimmy Kelly, Bridget McGovern, Isata Bah and Jesse Della Penna the precision of weights and measures.
Right: We are "Best Buddies"!
Top: Frankie DiPietro (right) is always happy to meet up with his CD friends outside of the classroom.
Below: Melissa Black and Bryant Hall proclaim the Scriptures at the weekly Eucharist celebrated for the OLC community.

REFERENCES
    Tudge, J. (1990) Vygotsky, the zone of proximal development, and peer collaboration: implications for classroom practice, in Vygotsky and education: Instructional implications and applications of sociohistorical psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Damon, W. (1995) Greater expectations: overcoming the culture of indulgences in America's homes and schools. New York: The Free Press.