Hechinger Report

When Bethany Jolliffe started teaching kindergarten 15 years ago, she picked up on what seemed like a long-standing pattern: Teachers mostly stayed in their lane, with general education teachers focusing on “their” students, and special education teachers homed in on students deemed to be their responsibility. Instead of keeping children with disabilities in classrooms and bringing help to them, teachers often pulled them out of the classroom, away from their peers. Nationwide, that’s a common approach in schools, where many students with disabilities, starting in kindergarten, are segregated from their classmates for large portions of the day. At Westmoor Elementary in west Scottsbluff, where Jolliffe is now assistant principal, that’s no longer the case. In classrooms across the school, children of all abilities learn side by side. Scottsbluff and many other communities across Nebraska have joined a statewide effort over the past few years to include more children with disabilities in general education classrooms for the majority of the day.