Episode 33: Why Should Parents Be Included in the Inclusive Education Conversation?

On Today’s episode, I welcome my guest Katherine Kelly. Katherine is the Executive Director of IncludeNJ. Join us as we discuss why it is important to include parents and caregivers in the inclusive education conversation.

Transcript

Arthur: This is the Inclusion Think Tank Podcast brought to you by New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education, NJCIE. Where we talk about inclusive education, why it works, and how to make it happen. On Today’s episode, I welcome my guest Katherine Kelly. Katherine is the Executive Director of IncludeNJ. Join us as we discuss why it is important to include parents and caregivers in the inclusive education conversation.

Arthur I would like to welcome everyone back to another episode of the Inclusion Think Tank podcast brought to you by the New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education. I'm your host, Arthur Aston, and I am happy to welcome my guest to the podcast today, Katherine Kelly. So, Katherine, thank you for joining me for this episode.

Katherine: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Arthur: Yes. So, we talked a few minutes before I started recording and, let you know a little bit about myself, and so I'm excited to hear about you and to learn all of the great things you all are doing there at IncludeNJ, so again, thank you for joining me.

Katherine: Yeah. Thank you. I can just jump into it and let you know a little bit about myself and a little bit about the organization.

Arthur: Yeah, that would be great, can you tell us who you are and what you do? And I always like to know how people became interested in the world of inclusive education. And also if you could share something fun you'd like to do in your free time.

Katherine: Thanks. Yeah, that's a lot. I'm a full person, so I've got a lot to share with you, but I'll pick one.

Arthur: Great.

Katherine: Okay, So again, my name is Katherine Kelly. I am the executive director of IncludeNJ, and we are a brand-new organization that seeks to help parents and caregivers of students, 3 to 21. So running the whole gamut of pre-K all the way to transition. We are here to help those parents really navigate the school system and work towards an inclusive education for the students that they care for and the students in their families.

Myself, I have a background in nonprofit marketing. I have been doing nonprofit marketing for too many years, so I come to the organization through a different organization that I worked at previously. It seems like many of my roles in the past have always gravitated toward students and towards education. So I have worked for the Muscular Dystrophy Association and I've worked for Little Kids Rock I have worked for Eye2Eye.

I have worked for all these organizations that are kind of looking to have the same end goal, and that is to create a society that we want to have. We want our kids to grow up and model the society that we want to build for them. So that is what lands me here IncludeNJ is my background in nonprofits and my background in marketing.

Katherine: And really, when I talk about myself as a marketer, I like to think of myself more as kind of a storyteller of the organization that I work for. So I really have to have that kind of passion in me to be able to share those stories, and finding out about NJCIE, and finding out about the drive for inclusive education just was a natural fit in all of the work that I've been doing for over a decade now in nonprofits.

Arthur: Wow, that's great. I love that you said, you’re being A storyteller for the organization, that is it's so true because you really are. You’re putting out to the world what the organization does, telling their story. You are the storyteller. That's a great way to explain it. That's cool.

Katherine: So I am actually a part of a community chorus here in my hometown of Jersey City. So I love that's what I'm doing in my free time is just belting out Broadway and American songs from the American Songbook.

Arthur: Oh, that's great. That's so cool. I love Broadway. I love going to shows in New York. And I recently saw Fat Ham on Broadway before it closed.

it was a really fun show. But wow, that's great. So you're a singer. that's cool.

Arthur: So can you tell us what does inclusive education mean to you?

Katherine: Absolutely. So inclusive education, I can tell you from my own perspective as a parent, I discovered I found out a lot more about what goes on in a special education setting versus a general education setting, when my child was diagnosed with ADHD at a very young age. I got to learn the ins and outs of students being pulled out of their classrooms and being segregated for their special time with their paraprofessionals and with their special education educators. I also got a really good understanding of what that felt like. On the other side of it.

I was diagnosed myself through having my child diagnosed with ADHD, which is how it happens these days as especially as women. We are diagnosed much later in life and people find out, Hey, this whole time I've had ADHD that answers so many questions, so I was diagnosed later in life. And looking back at my own education back in the nineties, aging myself here. But I would have had such an easier time had I known that at the time.

I think that it would been great if other students around me also had an understanding of what was going on with me and that would have prepared them to be able to collaborate better with me and prepared me to be able to work in the classroom with everyone around me.

So that's my back story. And then as coming up and being the mama bear and fighting for your kids and fighting for the education that they're entitled to, I ran into so many roadblocks just as a mom, and I'm just a mom with a kid with ADHD. And I know that it's neurodiversity that a lot of us have and a lot of us are being we're getting more precise in how we diagnose that now.

So a lot of us are coming up and a lot of our children are coming up with ADHD. And so it is just generally out there and a lot of information is out there on how to teach children with those different learning differences that we have. Yet you still run into the walls in the general education classrooms.

Katherine: As a mom, just coming up in IEP meetings and 504 meetings, just like I don't understand why we can't have these accommodations for my kid. That's just going to make it easier on everybody involved. It was always a fight with my school district, and that was in everything I tried from pulling out of public school into charter systems and going back into the public school system.

I never encountered any collaboration as a parent in the school district that I'm in. So that's where I'm coming to this from, and seeing students that are completely pulled out of the system and watching how they don't have that integration with their peers and their peers don't have the integration either. That’s a problem on the other side like it's not like they’re living in a society where everyone is sitting exactly the same at a desk and everyone is, you know, and learns exactly the same way.

So these people are going to have to graduate from school at some point and work with tons of different people with tons of different learning styles, and we're not preparing our general students to do that either.

Arthur: Yeah, I really appreciate what you said about if you had known about ADHD earlier, your peers would have been able to better collaborate with you and understand and you would have a better understanding of them as well.

I think that's the the good thing about the early diagnosis and the early integration of both classes to have, people with disabilities in the general education setting to have everybody just understands everyone a lot better.

it makes it okay because as you said, eventually these children who are now in kindergarten or first or second grade, eventually they're going to graduate high school and be out in the working world where people like you said, they learn differently and they will have to work side by side and on teams with people who learn differently and have different styles of learning and ways of doing things, and the earlier we can have them working together and understanding each other better, I think that really sets everyone up for, a better future.

Katherine: Completely agree. And this is a party that we're trying to build. And I think that every generation does that, trying to build a better society for our children and the generation after us, and if we want to build that society, we have to model it in our education system.

Arthur: Wow.So true. You started talking a little bit about IncludeNJ when you were introducing yourself. Can you share a little bit more about the organization with us? Things like their mission and vision and the core values of includeNJ

Katherine: Yeah, absolutely. So as I said, IncludeNJ is a fairly new organization and we are coming into New Jersey as the least inclusive of all of the school districts, all the states. We're coming in as a tool for parents. We're supporting and empowering the family so all the families of students with disabilities because we feel like we need that kind of networking and advocacy to come from a kind of a groundswell of parents and caregivers and all of the people basically in the students lives that are fighting for their right to a free and appropriate public education.

So our mission is to support parents, and guardians. And I'm reading it because we just updated it and I'm so excited that we did. Support parents, guardians, caregivers, and their families to advocate for inclusion, equity and belonging and education. So that's for students with disabilities from age 3 to 21.

So like I said, we want to run the gamut from pre-K all the way to transition planning.

We want to ensure that the parents have someone they can go to, or community, that they can go to that also agrees that inclusive education is research-backed and is the way to go.

Arthur: Yeah, I love that a recurring theme is collaboration through this conversation and so many other conversations I've had on the podcast. It’s so true because I can remember as I've shared with you and other guests, I was born with a disability, so I've had it my whole life and going to school, I can remember what you said about advocating for your own child. I can remember my parents doing the same thing and, the mama and papa bear came out of them to make sure that I had what I was supposed to have in the general education setting.

Arthur: I was young, so I don't of course, I don't know everything that was going on. But from my perception, I can recall that it just seemed like, it was just my parents. There were never other parents that were involved.

Like I said, having a collaborative effort to make a change. So to hear that organizations like IncludeNJ and others like NJCIE are working together to make sure that, as you said, everyone in that child's life is on the same page to really move that child forward to reach their full potential.

It is really encouraging to hear. Really great to hear, and I'm proud to really be a part of NJCIE, and the work that they are doing to make these changes happen. And in our great state of New Jersey.

Katherine: Well, NJCIE is an amazing organization and they are what I'm seeing with NJCIE is that they are really going in at the school level, at the district level. So going in on that side of it

What IncludeNJ does is give a voice to the parents on the other side of it and really give them a friend on the inside that knows like knows what's happening. I know when I first started meeting with the school and started having these special education meetings for my own child, I had no idea and I had no idea where to look and what were my rights as a parent.

Katherine: Am I allowed to come in and see what's happening in the classroom? Am I allowed to get any kind of information from the school? And the school wasn't forthcoming on giving me like, here's what you can do. The school wasn't forthcoming on telling me like, this is your right to be able to have all of this information on what's happening with your student throughout the year and all of this collaboration.

So going into it, we actually have former special education leaders that help out and speak directly with parents and review their IEPs or review their final four designations and give advice and advice on how to advocate for their own students. And if that's exhausted that the parent is not able to do that on their own.

We have special education professionals that have been in districts for years and years that are now retired from the districts that can come in and advocate for the student and be there as a support for the parent so that they're getting all of the information they need to really collaborate with the school, which is what we all want. We just want to come in and be able to work with the school as a partner to come in and ensure that the student has the education that they deserve.

Arthur: Yes, the partnership is key. It's so important to have those partnerships with everyone nvolved, because it takes everybody to move hat student forward and to again, have that collaboration with everybody is really key.

Katherine: right

Arthur: Yes. So my last question I have for you is: Why do you feel it is important to include parents and caregivers in the inclusive education conversation? And the second part of that group, this question is what positive impact do you feel that parents or caregivers can bring to the inclusive education conversation?

Katherine: Well, yeah, that definitely goes off more into what I was just alluding to about the partnership, right? So having the parents at the table and having them working directly with the educators and being really involved in the student's care and the students education moving forward, that ensures that at home they are learning as well that the education doesn't stop when they walk out of the school building, that education continues and it's all coming from different directions, but leading the student to the same place and giving the student education that they deserve and that they are entitled to.

It's also important that parents are educated on what their rights are in the state of New Jersey. And a lot of that information is buried. And it's not easy to go just Google and figure it out because everything is in legalese and it's all there's so much out there that sifting through it can be time-consuming.

And on top of that, it's just confusing different directions that you can go in with your own student's education.

Katherine: So being able to sit down with the school and come up with a plan and have that plan agreed to by everyone in the room, that is just that is exactly what our students need. So that's the importance of having parents in there for inclusive education.

Also, some parents don't understand the research behind inclusion. Some parents will be told, you know, the best thing for your student is to be pulled out. The best thing for your student is to be in a segregated space and that's not the case. We've got years and years of research backing that up, that that is not what's best for the students.

It's not what's best for the students on either side of it. The general education students that aren't dealing with the special education and the special education students, it doesn't work for anybody.

What works is to have everyone working together in the classroom because everyone is learning from everyone else in that setting. And it's a shame that that information isn't as readily available to parents.

Katherine: So that's another reason that they should be fully engaged and present and asking for inclusive education, because our laws say that we have we're supposed to be delivering a least restrictive environment to all students and the least restrictive environment isn't segregation in any way, the least restrictive environment is keeping them with their peers in their general education classroom.

Arthur: Right. Yeah, That is, like you said, the research and the law are, you know, everything is there. It's written out that, inclusive education is, the best way to go. And, it's really great. Again, all the work that you all are doing there to make sure that the parents are educated about inclusion, inclusive education, they can figure it out together with you all and the other people and the other people involved in their child's education, like what's best for their child.

And I can definitely relate to, as you said, how information is just not out there. It's not easy to find sometimes. I can remember that again with my parents just looking for things and trying to figure things out. And this was I was a child in the eighties and nineties. And so, you know, the Internet wasn’t, Google wasn't there really when I was younger.

Arthur: So it was even a little more difficult to find information, I'm sure, for my parents. But, I'm glad that parents have that resource, the resources available to them through IncludeNJ, and the great work you're doing there.

Katherine: So back in August as school is just kind of ramping up to get started, we did a webinar for parents on our Facebook page and we've left that there as just a resource for parents so that if they have questions about going into IEP meetings and things like that, we're a resource for them.

So that recording is available on our Facebook page.

Arthur: Great. Thank you so much for mentioning that. We will be sure to include the link to your Facebook page in the show notes so everyone can go view that webinar with the much needed information to get the school year started. So school is up in full force at this point.

So it would be a great resource for parents to have access to that. So thank you for bringing that up.

Katherine: Absolutely.

Arthur: So thank you. Thank you for this conversation and again, for sharing your information with us about yourself and IncludeNJ and looking forward to connecting with you again at some point for some other projects and things.

So I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and we will be in touch soon.

Katherine: Okay. Thank you so much for having me.

Arthur: Yes, you're welcome. And thank you,