Inclusive Educations Begins with Bus Trips to Canada

Dohn Hoyle, Partners in Policymaking Faculty Member, Activist and Organizer
17. Inclusive Educations Begins with Bus Trips to Canada
That's what the '50s were all about. And we'd had this permissive special education, wasn't mandated that grew up into these segregated things, and it was separating people by certain categories. We were good, real good, at diagnostics and real good at categorizing, and not very good at preparation for adult life, which I can say is probably true for special education overall, but even more when it's segregated.
And so, when I heard about this, I said, okay, I gotta go see it. And I heard about where it was happening, so I made arrangements to take two parents to go see it. It was happening in Kitchener and Hamilton, Ontario. And so I took these two parents on a little tour in my car to go see it. And the way home was mostly parents crying and feeling bad, and this kind of stuff. So, when we got back, they said, "What are we gonna do about it?" So we began some efforts to try to organize around how we could make some of the things we saw happen for us in Michigan.
And so among the efforts we made were to bring the people from Kitchener and Hamilton to Michigan to talk, and then send people up there to see it. So I took a number of vans up there, and gradually the vans, I didn't go anymore. And they set up ways that they dealt with people when they got there. And turns out, we sent over 600 people up to there to see it in vans. And then, that increased because people from Minnesota also went, and they set up workshops up here for how they did it and what they did.
But it was just such a change from what we saw in our little old-fashioned attempted special ed in Michigan. I say old-fashioned because it was fashioned on what had come previously. And there was this belief that people got more individual attention if you had smaller classes of just people with certain disabilities, and so on and so forth. And it turns out that's not the case. It turns out that most of the teacher and the staff's time are spent caring for people's needs as opposed to teaching them anything.
And people are learning from their peers, like we know all kids do. And what you learn from your peers, if they all have disabilities, and all have been treated the same way, is not necessarily what other people learn or what other people have modeled for them or see. So, inclusive education became really important. As we organized around this, we did all kinds of things, like have sessions we would put on where we had certain people present, and among them were people who knew how to facilitate the accomplishment of people's IEPs in an inclusive classroom.