I do believe . . .

. . . that my school isn't the worst, most segregated school out there.

There are 72 different school boards in Ontario. Seven of them have fully segregated schools; schools that have hundreds of students, all who have a disability of some sort. One school board out of this 72 is fully inclusive. The remaining school boards have segregated classes within some of the schools.

Although my school has a special education class, I do give them credit in some areas:
- I like that they eat in the cafeteria . . . Some schools don't allow that.
- I liked that last semester students from our leadership class collected the attendance with these students. It wasn't just the "DC Kids" who were doing this job.
- I like that some students from these classes are included in other clubs within the school, like the KEY Club.

- I am glad that our school has taken the initiative to introduce Best Buddies to our school. I think this is could potentially be a HUGE stepping stone for inclusion at our school, as long as Best Buddies focuses on equality, within authentic friendships.
- I like that my brother Alex has been broken of a habit that we didn't believe would ever go away; this happened because his teacher took the time to work on it.
- I appreciate that Alex's teacher and EA's have been working with this Clicker 5 program (builds language skills - creating sentences, reading, etc.); this was a program that they were not initially familiar with, so I appreciate them trying it out, and working on it with Alex.
- I like how we almost always get smiles from everyone in Alex's classroom.

I am happy to say that I attend the school that I attend. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't room for improvement; there is always something that someone can improve on, even if they are an educator from that one fully inclusive school board. Open minds are the key to improvement. If you close your minds completely, things are guaranteed to stay the same as they always have been.

I would also like to note: Past and future blog entries are not just prevalent to my own school. A lot of these topics, questions, etc. were ideas that were brought up at the re:Action 4 Inclusion conference I attended a couple months ago. I learned a lot from this event, and want to share what the youth from this conference have had to say.