What Schools Still Get Wrong About Inclusion

When Inclusion Reinforces Separation

My daughter is a junior in high school. Like many girls her age, she thinks school is boring, loves lunch with her friends, participates in extracurricular activities, and lives for school dances.

My daughter also has Down syndrome.

Like many students with intellectual disabilities, she spends part of her school day in a separate “life skills” classroom where she receives the academic support she needs. But from the moment she entered high school, my husband and I wanted something more for her than access to academics alone. We wanted her to belong to the broader fabric of the school community.

So when we learned about a student-led club created to “build a bridge” between students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers, we were thrilled. This sounded exactly like the kind of thing schools need more of.

Then we learned how the club actually functioned.

The weekly lunch gatherings took place inside the life skills classroom, meaning students with disabilities stayed in their separate area of campus while non-disabled students came to visit them.

And then there was the prom.

Not the school’s actual prom, which came and went without much conversation about inclusion. This was a separate prom hosted later for students with disabilities during the school day.

I remember staring at the flyer trying to reconcile what I was reading with the club’s mission statement about inclusion and connection.

Because the more I observed, the more I found myself asking a deeply uncomfortable question:

What if some of our well-intended inclusion efforts are actually reinforcing the very separateness we say we want to eliminate?

As the date for the “special prom” got closer, more details emerged. Students from sports teams and clubs were encouraged to do promposals and attend the dance with students with disabilities. Everyone around me talked about how sweet it was.

And maybe it was.

But I also couldn’t stop wondering why the setup felt so one-sided.

Why weren’t students with disabilities also encouraged to ask someone to the dance? What if my daughter wanted to attend with one of her friends from the life skills class instead of being paired with a non-disabled peer? Why did the entire structure seem built around disabled students being recipients of inclusion rather than participants in mutual relationships?

That was the moment I began realizing something that has stayed with me ever since: inclusion can still be built upon a foundation of separation.

And I don’t think this school is unique.

In fact, I think versions of this are happening in schools, churches, and communities all over the country. Well-intended programs are often created by non-disabled people for disabled people, sometimes without much input from the very community they aim to serve. The goal is kindness. The intention is connection. And yet, somehow, disabled people still remain “over there.”

To be clear, I am not questioning whether programs like this are needed. The reality is that my daughter is a tiny minority within her school community. Her high school has roughly 2,200 students. Only a small fraction of those students have intellectual disabilities.

Teenagers are developmentally wired to seek belonging, identity, and connection with people who feel similar to them. One of the strongest predictors of friendship during adolescence is perceived similarity. Teenagers naturally gravitate toward people who share their interests, communication styles, experiences, and identities.

That means many students may never naturally pursue a relationship with someone like my daughter unless opportunities for genuine connection exist.

And honestly, that matters for everyone involved.

Because while adolescence naturally pulls young people toward sameness, it is also one of the most important stages of life for expanding empathy, social flexibility, and understanding difference. We do not become our best selves by remaining only with people who mirror us. We grow through proximity to people whose experiences stretch our understanding of the world and of humanity itself.

Schools play a massive role in shaping which instincts get reinforced. From preschool through high school, students absorb messages about who belongs, who is valued, who is separate, and who is seen as a full member of the community.

And the truth is, for most of our nation’s history, people with disabilities were intentionally separated from society.

Students with disabilities were not guaranteed access to public education until 1975. Before then, many were excluded entirely from their neighborhood schools. Even after federal law granted access, students with disabilities were often placed in separate classrooms and separate programs, physically present on campuses but still viewed as outside the core life of the school.

That legacy still lingers.

You can feel it in the way students with disabilities are often treated more like visitors than members. You can feel it in the way interactions with disabled students are frequently framed as volunteer opportunities or acts of service rather than ordinary friendship. You can feel it in the praise non-disabled students sometimes receive simply for spending time with disabled peers, as though basic human connection is somehow extraordinary.

And look, I know educators and students are trying. I have met incredible teachers and teenagers who genuinely care about building more inclusive communities. I have seen real progress. My daughter herself has benefited from people willing to move toward discomfort and connection.

But I have also witnessed how harmful it can be when inclusion efforts are built on top of old assumptions about separateness instead of fully confronting them.

Because there is a difference between welcoming someone and truly viewing them as belonging.

I also want to say clearly that I am not opposed to separate spaces.

My daughter’s life skills classroom exists to support her educational needs. It provides accommodations and instruction that help her access learning in ways that would be difficult otherwise. Separate spaces can be healing, supportive, and necessary for many different groups of people.

The problem is not separation alone.

The problem is when separation quietly becomes othering.

When separate spaces unintentionally communicate that disabled students are not fully part of the larger community. When inclusion becomes something done for disabled people rather than with them. When students with disabilities are viewed primarily as opportunities for generosity instead of as peers, contributors, classmates, teammates, artists, leaders, and friends.

After that first “special prom” — which, to be fair, my daughter genuinely enjoyed — I reached out to the club advisor and asked if I could meet with the student leaders. I shared my observations and asked questions about whether the structure of the club was truly aligned with its mission of building bridges and fostering inclusion.

I wondered why the club didn’t prioritize helping students with disabilities access the school dances and activities already taking place. I wondered whether hosting lunches inside the life skills classroom unintentionally reinforced division rather than connection.

My questions were not received well.

There was immediate defensiveness from some parents, teachers, and students. I was told I was making kind students feel bad about their efforts. People emphasized how wonderful it was that non-disabled students wanted to spend time with students like my daughter at all.

And that response, in many ways, revealed the deeper issue.

Because if we believe disabled students are already full members of the community, then inclusion should not be viewed as something to volunteer for. Friendship should not be viewed as service. Shared experiences should not require celebration simply because disabled students are present.

My daughter, students with disabilities, does not need to be someone’s good deed.

She needs what every teenager needs: friendship, belonging, mutuality, connection, awkwardness, laughter, heartbreak, inside jokes, community.

She needs to be seen not as an act of kindness, but as a person fully worthy of taking up space within the ordinary fabric of high school life.

This school year, her junior year, my attended her junior prom. She was the only student in the life skills program to attend the school prom. A few weeks before prom, when I was at school to meet with a teacher, I ran into one of my daughter’s classmates. We got to chatting about how it was his senior year and he was so excited to graduate. I asked if he would be attending his prom. He said, “no, I’m not going to the school prom, I’m going to go to the special prom.” And it hit me: the very thing created to promote inclusion was actually perpetuating separateness.

Maybe the question we need to start asking when we create programs meant to promote inclusion:

Are we helping students with disabilities belong more deeply within the community, or are we unintentionally reinforcing the idea that they exist outside of it?

Because students learn far more from the structures we build than from the mission statements we write.