(bright music) - Authentic social relationships for students with disabilities ideally happen in the same way that relationships develop between students who do not have disabilities. And that is that kids, young adults, children share environments and they share common activities where they find what their interests are that are alike. So a group of kids decides to do martial arts together, there's a group of 12 kids, and two of them really just hit it off. Then their parents start arranging play dates for them.
Or if the students are older, they begin calling one another. So that's sort of the typical way that friendships happen. When a special social relationship group is started, and these usually happen in schools, what tends to happen is that the school has in mind a group of students with disabilities who are not really making friends. They're not spending meaningful time together in school.
And they're probably not spending much time with classmates during off school hours. So what they do is they set up a club and then they recruit students to participate. So in my experience, many of these clubs have kind of an over-representation of the percentage of students with disabilities. So it might be 10 kids with disabilities and 10 students without.
And sometimes the students without disabilities are given some kind of reward for their participation. It might be class credit. It might be community service credits or hours. And by and large, the activities of this group are facilitated by adults.
I guess I first want to let you know that I think in some of those situations, authentic friendships can develop. And then they typically are more ongoing outside of that original organization. But the concerns, and perhaps the downsides, of those friendship clubs or friendship groups can really have some negative consequences for both the students with and without disabilities. Number one, kids don't have to pay other kids to hang out with them.
And while kids may not use that language to describe why they participate, some kids may end up participating because they need those community service hours rather from sort of a desire to get to know a student who happens to have a disability because they share something in common. I think it sends the wrong message. It sends the message that sort of the school thinks that this is a group of kids that need to have people paid to hang out with them. And particularly when this is done, when students with disabilities are not fully involved in either the academic mainstream of the school and when they're not involved in typical extracurricular activities, I think there are some long-term negative consequences.
So what I would encourage you to do is to, in fact, recognize and acknowledge that you may have students who are not connecting. Work hard to figure out what supports those students do need to participate in academic classes, and really, since we're talking about social relationships, especially in extracurricular activities. I don't think we really need to create a special club when most campuses have just a variety of offerings for kids with a variety of interests and passion. When the sort of typical inclusion efforts with students with complex access needs don't then result in at least a few authentic and reciprocal connections, then I think it makes sense to go to the next step, which is very intentional, yet respectful individualized social relationship facilitation.
