ALBANY, N.Y. — Mervin Rodriguez loves to dance.
But because he is nonverbal, his parents don’t feel safe just dropping him off at his elementary school’s dance.
It’s yet another way in which the 7-year-old feels isolated from the rest of his school community in the town of Rotterdam.
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It is all too common. Families around the Capital Region say their schools do not proactively plan for students with disabilities to attend after-school clubs, dances and other nonacademic activities.
That leaves them feeling like their children are not wanted there, although some school officials said that now that they know the children want to attend, they will provide accommodations to make that possible.
In 2004, Congress amended the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to require schools to make those activities accessible, but only if the specific activity and needed supports are in the child’s individualized education program. That program is set in an annual meeting with school officials and the child’s family.
For Mervin’s family, demanding accommodations for extracurriculars felt like too much to request.
“It’s frustrating because you’re dealing with everything else that comes with special needs,” said Mervin’s mom, Cristine Rodriguez. “You wonder if some things are worth your time.”
Other parents said they, too, felt like they would be asking for too much if they also wanted support for extracurriculars.
But Stacey Ratner, director of Children’s Services for the downstate-based Adults & Children with Learning & Developmental Disabilities, Inc., said that even if parents ask, they’re unlikely to get the school dance or a club listed in their child’s IEP.
“They will fight back. I’ve heard at many a district meeting: ‘You’re guaranteed a free and appropriate education, not the best of the best,’” she said.
She thinks opening up social activities at school to children with disabilities is actually critical to their development.
“You are not going to be a productive member of society if you cannot interact with others,” she said. “It’s hard to learn social skills when everyone in your group has an impairment.”
She said the effective solution is for the school to create a peer mentoring group so that children with disabilities can attend events with another child.
Mervin’s mom suddenly realized that her son was missing out on important experiences when she took him to his special needs baseball team’s end-of-year banquet in 2023.
“They had a DJ and it was like nothing else mattered. You couldn’t peel him off the dance floor,” she said.
It was a revelation: their son loved music!
This summer, they took him to his first live concert. He loved it.
So, they think he would love his elementary school’s Saint Patrick’s Day dance in March. They just can’t send him.
As a child who’s nonverbal, how would he signal if he needed bathroom help? Could he find his way through a chaotic drop-off and pick-up crowd? If he got lost, how would he ask for help?
“If there was a dance tomorrow, I’d have to say no, because there would be no accommodations,” Rodriguez said.
She doesn’t need a lot: someone designated as a checkpoint, or an older student as a buddy. For most children, she said, an event just needs someone who is told, in advance, what the students with disabilities need and how best to provide it.
Others have proposed providing assistance for their own child — to no avail.
In Troy, senior Cutter Rodgers asked a teacher if he was allowed to bring his mother to the homecoming dance. After a bad experience at the dance in his sophomore year, the student who has autism finally got up the nerve to try again — but he knew he needed support at the event. The teacher told him that parents weren’t allowed.
Troy officials said they deeply regretted that Cutter received that message.
He ended up going to a restaurant with his mom instead of the dance. The restaurant, Illusive, in Rensselaer, even decorated a corner with Troy school colors for him.
It was a good night, but his mom, Cameron Rodgers, said she wanted her son and his friends in the special education classrooms to enjoy the typical high school senior experiences.
“There’s a bunch of kids that are being left out,” she said. “The other kids in his class can’t be just dropped off at a dance.”
It’s not clear whether the teacher Cutter asked fully understood his request. Leaders at the school did not know he wanted to bring his mother as an accommodation.
“It would not have been denied. We obviously want all of our students to participate in school events,” spokesman Jason Laz said, calling it a “major miscommunication.”
He said the school’s events always have a multitude of adults, and tasking one of them to offer specific supports to students with disabilities would be simple.
“That sounds like an absolutely incredible no-brainer to do,” he said. “They want to make these events successful for all our kids. If we know there’s someone that needs extra help, we want to work with the families to make that happen.”
But he — and school leaders from several school districts — asked why parents hadn’t come to them to ask for accommodations.
The parents, meanwhile, asked why their schools weren’t offering supports for all events in the same way that they offer supports, such as appropriate supervision, for students who do not have disabilities.
In the Mohonasen school district in Rotterdam, the special education director acknowledged that families have a point.
Director for Special and Alternative Education Bernadette Callender said she wants to start asking families about extracurriculars during their regular meetings.
“‘Hey, what do you want outside of our education? What could make it a better experience for your child?’” she said she could ask.
When they send out sign-ups for events, she said Mohonasen could ask parents to respond with the accommodations needed so that their child with disabilities could attend.
For some students, even finding out about events can be difficult.
In Amsterdam, elementary school parent Ada Peters was shaken when she attended a recent PTA meeting. There, she found out that the school had an after-care program and several clubs. But she said she never got a flyer about them, leading her to believe the flyers were not sent to her son’s special education classroom.
“Computer club, outdoors club, I would love for him to be able to do that. But who’s going to be there to support him? Is there anyone?” Peters said. “There’s no giving them a chance. They just assume they’re special needs, so we shouldn’t have to offer them these things.”
Amsterdam’s special education director, Christine Smith, said that perhaps Peters just didn’t notice the announcements.
“The after-school programs have flyers hanging up around schools and information was put on Parent Square,” she said.
At the secondary level, she said Amsterdam has provided accommodations for some students.
However, she said parents must be the ones to reach out and ask — the district is not offering supports in its announcements. Parents should ask their principal or club adviser, she said.
“We want to know if a student is interested in a club, sport, etc.,” she said. “We can and will work with a parent to identify what supports make sense for that child.”
The goal is to “genuinely support” the student with “creating stigma or dependency,” she said.
Peters said her son — and many other children with disabilities — need more help to start socializing at an event. Other children sometimes see their disability first and avoid or bully them.
“Are other kids going to be nice to him, is someone going to talk to him? Is someone going to push him?” Peters said. “Have someone there to kind of initiate socialization or make sure they’re still having fun, that they’re not standing in a corner.”
Smith said it’s not uncommon for the district to provide extra supervision to support students with disabilities.
More often, the district has told club advisers about a student to advise them on potential needs or has a social worker help prepare a student before attending the event. But on occasion they’ve offered “increased adult support … especially for our students with visual impairments,” she said.
Extra supervision is an expense, Callender of the Mohonasen district, said. After-school clubs at Mohonasen schools occur during the contractual working hours for aides, so the district could pay them, she said. But for evening events, like a dance, they need volunteers.
“The biggest piece is going to be how can we ensure there will be staff members? Sometimes the volunteering isn’t always solid,” she said.
But one special education teacher persuaded teacher’s assistants to provide child care during a parent information night, she said.
“I think it’s 1.) going to be how do we look at the events for the remainder of the year? and 2.) Can we find a reasonable financial solution to support them? and 3.) Add to communication and really just survey the community — where would they like us to focus on first?” she said.
As a longtime special education teacher, she knows that children notice when they are not treated like other students.
“They already feel different,” she said.
Cristine Rodriguez is hopeful that the Mohonasen district will find a way for her son to go to his first school dance.
“They’re just like everyone else,” she said of students in special education. “They want to be included. They want to feel like they’re a part of everything.”
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