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“If we are serious about ending segregation in our schools, that requires changing how our schools function.”

Somerville School Committee member Andre Green reportedly made that observation last week as the Committee considered the future of the Winter Hill and Brown Schools.

He’s right.

And if we mean it, we need to be willing to apply that principle to a form of segregation public education has normalized for generations: the separation of students with disabilities.

Disability segregation is not “_the new segregation_.” It is old. What is overdue is our willingness to recognize it as part of the same fundamental question Green identified: How do the structures and practices of our schools determine which children learn together, which children are separated, and which children are treated as full members of their school communities?

We have learned to recognize that simply putting children in the same building does not necessarily integrate them. We understand that equity cannot be measured by architecture alone. We increasingly recognize that school boundaries, programs, opportunities, and institutional decision-making can determine who belongs with whom and who receives access to what.

Those principles should apply just as seriously to students with disabilities.

A substantially separate classroom located inside a general education school can still be profoundly separate.

A disabled child can enter through the same front door as their nondisabled peers and spend much of the school day apart from them.

Their classroom can sit twenty feet from another classroom while the children inside experience different access to grade-level curriculum, electives, lunch, recess, assemblies, extracurricular activities, friendships, and the ordinary social life of their school.

And a district can describe itself as inclusive while individual families are left asking a much more basic question:

Who decided how separated my child needed to be- and was that decision actually individualized to my child?

That distinction matters.

Special education is not a separate school system operating alongside public education. Students with disabilities are public school students first and foremost. Special education provides individualized instruction, services, supports, and protections to eligible students so they can access their public education. It should not create a separate class of students whose education is treated as the exclusive concern of a special education department.

Nor are all disabled students receiving special education.

Some Section 504 plans. Some receive interventions through general education. Some struggle while waiting for evaluation. Some have disabilities that have not yet been identified at all.

This is why disability inclusion cannot be confined to a special education department, a parent advisory council, or a single School Committee liaison.

Disability inclusion is a whole-school-system responsibility.

An accessible building is not necessarily an inclusive school.

Somerville is currently considering what may be one of its most consequential educational investments in decades: a new school at 115 Sycamore Street.

Conceptual designs presented to the School Committee include special education spaces situated within grade-level neighborhoods. The possible incorporation of the Brown School has also brought its physical accessibility limitations into the public discussion.

Those are important considerations, and we should build schools that are physically accessible and intentionally designed to facilitate inclusion.

But we should be careful not to confuse the architecture of inclusion with inclusion itself.
A floor plan cannot tell us whether a disabled second grader will actually learn alongside nondisabled second graders.
It cannot tell us whether that child has meaningful access to grade-level curriculum.
It cannot tell us whether separation is being used only to the extent necessary for that individual student.
It cannot tell us whether students in specialized programs meaningfully participate in the academic, extracurricular, and social life of their schools.

And it cannot tell us whether families were meaningful participants in the decisions that determined where and how their children would be educated.

Those questions are about exactly what Green identified: how our schools function.

The problem isn’t specialization. It’s separation by default.

This part of the conversation requires some precision.

Not every substantially separate program is inherently inappropriate. Not every student needs the same educational environment. Some children require intensive specialized instruction or highly structured environments. Some students thrive in specialized programs, and some families actively seek them.

“Individualization” means different children will need different things.

The problem is not “difference.” The problem is  “default” – the problem arises when separation becomes a characteristic of a system rather than the result of careful individualized decision-making.

It arises when administrative structures begin determining children’s educational experiences.

It arises when the existence of a specialized program starts answering the question of where a child belongs before that child’s individual needs and circumstances do.

And it arises when we become so accustomed to grouping disabled children together that we stop asking whether each child’s degree of separation remains necessary, or whether the system has simply made separation easier for them to administer than inclusion.

“Least Restrictive Environment” cannot meaningfully be reduced to the address of the building where a child receives services.

Being inside a general education school is not the same thing as belonging to its educational community.

Parent participation matters even when parents agree

There is another part of this conversation that receives far less public attention: who gets to participate in making these decisions.

Meaningful parent participation is not a procedural protection reserved for parents who disagree with their school district.

A parent who ultimately says, “_Yes, this is exactly what my child needs_,” was still entitled to participate meaningfully in getting there. Family enthusiasm about an educational outcome does not answer whether the process used to reach that outcome was appropriately individualized.

And one family’s satisfaction cannot substitute for another family’s participation.

This matters beyond any particular program because individualized decision-making is one of the safeguards against systems turning categories of children into categories of placements.

There is another accessibility issue embedded here, too:

Parents themselves must be able to access the processes through which their children’s education is governed.

Meaningful participation must account for parents who have disabilities themselves, parents who require language access, and families who require accessible forms of communication or other accommodations to participate effectively.

A participation right that exists on paper but cannot meaningfully be used by the person holding it isn’t particularly meaningful.

Individual stories can become systemic questions

Families frequently enter special education believing that every problem is unique to their child. Sometimes it is.

But when families begin independently describing similar barriers- difficulty obtaining records, inaccessible participation, inadequate intervention, questions about individualized decision-making, inconsistent explanations of program structures, concerns about curriculum access or inclusion- the governing question changes.

At some point, individual experiences become data.
At some point, repeated procedural problems become questions about systems.
At some point, elected officials must ask whether they are looking at a collection of unrelated disputes or at patterns involving policy, implementation, resources, oversight, or leadership.

That matters because families cannot perpetually be referred back into the same administrative structure when the question they are raising is whether that structure itself is functioning properly.

This is especially important in special education because institutional silos can make systemic problems remarkably difficult to see.

A Child Find problem may look like one child’s delayed identification.
An inadequate intervention system may look like another child’s academic or behavioral struggle.
A placement problem may look like a disagreement between one family and one Team.
An inaccessible communication practice may look like one “difficult” parent.
A restrictive program structure may look like a collection of individual placement decisions.

Seen separately, every tree can be explained.
Governance requires occasionally looking at the forest.

Disabled students are not somebody else’s students

Perhaps the most important cultural shift Somerville can make is also the simplest:
Students with disabilities belong to the entire school district.

They do not belong exclusively to Special Education.
They do not belong exclusively to Student Services.
They do not belong exclusively to a SEPAC or to the School Committee member assigned as its liaison.

They belong to their classrooms.
Their schools.
Their PTAs.
Their district.
Their city.

And therefore the quality, accessibility, restrictiveness, inclusiveness, and educational adequacy of their education are matters of public-school governance.

That does not mean School Committee members should interfere with individual IEP Teams or adjudicate individual disputes.

It means they should be willing to ask systemic questions when the evidence warrants systemic questions.

That is what governing bodies are for.

What kind of system are we building?

Somerville now has an extraordinary opportunity.

We are discussing a school that may serve generations of children. We can build ramps and elevators. We can design accessible entrances. We can place specialized classrooms near grade-level classrooms. We can create shared spaces intentionally designed to bring children together.

We should do all of those things.

We should also confront racial and socioeconomic segregation and examine how neighborhood patterns, school assignment, resources, and institutional decisions reproduce inequality. Disability does not compete with those conversations. Disabled children exist across every racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and socioeconomic community in this city.

But if we want this new school to represent something genuinely different, we need to ask more than where its walls will go:

Who will learn together inside them?
Who gets grade-level curriculum?
Who participates in music, art, lunch, recess, field trips, assemblies, clubs, and the thousand ordinary experiences through which children come to understand that they belong somewhere?
When a child is separated, who determined that separation was necessary?
Was it individualized?
Was the family meaningfully included?
Is it continually reevaluated?

And are we willing to change the system when the answers aren’t good enough?

Andre Green’s observation about segregation deserves to outlive a single School Committee meeting:
“If we are serious about ending segregation in our schools, that requires changing how our schools function.”

Thirty years from now, I hope Somerville isn’t still having this conversation either.

But getting there requires more than constructing an accessible building.

It requires building an accessible system.

And if we truly believe that ending segregation requires changing how our schools function, then we should be willing to ask that question about every child our schools separate- and every system that decides where they belong.

Jessica Adams

Jessica Adams is a Somerville parent, disability and special education advocate, and Somerville SEPAC officer.

 She writes in her individual capacity.