It’s a little before lunchtime at Brown County High School. A doorbell chimes as a visitor enters the Essential Skills classroom.
With a smile on his face, Connor Lehman walks up to introduce himself, shakes the visitor’s hand and grabs her a chair.
Teacher Barb Kelp pulls up the forecast on a projector in the classroom to see when 60-degree weather will be returning as the class waits on more visitors to arrive. She asks Connor what the highest temperature of the day will be. After he picks 50 degrees, Kelp asks him if that is warm or cold? He says warm.
Nearby, Kaitlyn Lee-Redmon talks with a visitor about her job at McDonald’s. She works there on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, a proud smile accompanying her statement.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Junior Maya Wilkerson, who visits the class often, enters the room and waves to everyone. Redmon is excited to see her.
Wilkerson plans to get her license to teach special education so she can work in a classroom like Essential Skills.
On this day, she will not be the only student to visit with this class. March was Disability Awareness Month in Indiana, and at Brown County High School, the observance is a week long.
“One of the big things we are hoping to accomplish with our Disabilities Awareness Week is a sense of community among all people,” Kelp said. “In fact, that was the tagline under our T-shirt design for this year: ‘Promoting Community Among All People.’”
Raising awareness
This year, Kelp worked with the high school’s student council to sign up small groups of students to come to the Essential Skills classroom to interact and play games with them.
Every day, a different group visits the classroom to play Price Is Right with Essential Skills students. The day before, the students baked cookies, sang songs and danced with their visitors.
The following day, visitors were going to come in at lunchtime to just sit and eat lunch with the Essential Skills class. Later in the week, they were going to the gymnasium to participate in a yoga class.
“It doesn’t have to be huge, but I think it’s going to open doors for the students, open up their worlds, and I think it will change their lives — the lives of my students, and it’s going to change the lives of the students that are coming to get to know us,” Kelp said — “the awareness that has been raised.”
Juniors Delaney Herald, Aubrey Hollander, Emma Summers, Mica Selby and Abigail Hollander walk in.
Redmon gets up to introduce her friends in the classroom to the visitors. She forgets a name and appears flustered. Kelp gently reminds her that she can say, “I’m sorry. I don’t remember your name.”
It’s time for the Price Is Right. The visitors pick partners, sit next to them and look up at the game show projected on the whiteboard.
The first question has to deal with the cost to travel to New Hampshire and New Mexico. Does it cost $6,995 to go to New Mexico and $4,000 to go to New Hampshire? Or should the two prices be switched?
A few seconds pass as the pairs discuss. A couple say to switch the amounts, others say the prices are correct.
They learn that the prices should have been flipped.
The game continues on. In one round, students make their best guesses on how much different items cost, like compression socks for athletes and a machine that makes soup for you. Guesses are made, and math problems are solved to figure out who had the closest guess to the correct price without going over.
Money management is a part of the curriculum for the Essential Skills, Kelp said.
“We deal with how much money do you spend on something. We struggle with that conceptually. We go to Speedway once a week to buy a snack, but we also work on, ‘If you have $5, how much can you buy with $5? How much change should you get back?’” she said.
The Essential Skills program is designed to teach essential life skills to the students. Kelp customizes instruction for each student to meet their needs. They focus on skills like independent living and social skills, along with vocational instruction and recreation, Kelp said.
“Our goal is similar to the goal for all students: that when they walk across the stage during their senior year, they are ready to do something the next day,” she said.
The class also has community partners including the BP gas station, the Brown County Visitors Center, Speedway gas station, McDonald’s and Nashville Christian Church.
“My students aren’t going to college, but they’re going to go to a job. We work in the classroom first to teach skills then go out to community-based jobs,” Kelp said — like Redmon’s job at McDonald’s.
“Whatever level of employment that might be, if it’s 30 minutes a day being a Wal-Mart greeter or if it’s a four-hour shift at McDonald’s … that’s what we do here is to give people what they need to reach their life goals.”
‘Just like the rest of us’
The visiting students all said they enjoyed getting the opportunity to interact with students they often see walking the hallways, but never really spoke with before.
“We see them walking around the hallway a lot, so it was kind of cool to get the opportunity to come down here and actually see what they do,” Aubrey Hollander said.
“I thought it was super cool to be able to spend time with them,” Summers added.
Hollander said the experience was better than she expected, because when she thinks about special education, she thinks of students with severe disabilities who maybe aren’t able to interact with others at all.
“They interact with others just like the rest of us,” she said.
Wilkerson is in the class often and was happy to see her classmates there, too.
“It’s just, honestly, a great opportunity, no matter if you’re going into this field or not, to be able to establish a relationship with these kinds of people, because they are going to help you grow as a person individually,” she said.
This is the first time other students have been invited to participate in activities like this with the Essential Skills students before. Previously, the class created T-shirts highlighting the week.
“I think a lot of people here (at school) judge too fast. They see these kids walking around the school with these helpers and they automatically think they can’t be their friends because they have a teacher right next to them. That’s not fair,” Wilkerson said.
“Some of these kids actually get to go to normal classes, and then no one talks to them in those classes because they are afraid or too scared. That’s not OK.”
Herald said that this week provides students the opportunity to get to know and understand their classmates in the Essential Skills classroom. “I think learning more about them will help our ability to understand what they’re going through also,” she said.
Wilkerson said Redmon runs around the hallways saying “Hi” to everyone she sees. Sometimes, this is met with laughter.
“They’re afraid they will be judged if they are nice to someone like that, and then they get judged,” Herald said.
Wilkerson went on to explain that Lehman sees movies in his head, and that’s why he waves at everyone. “You guys are characters in his movie. He’s waving at them the whole time. He makes all of those noises and people laugh at him,” she said.
“The fact he sees movies is cool. I didn’t know that. That’s cool,” Summers said.
The students said they would make more of an effort to include all of their classmates in future interactions.
That’s what the week is about: Closing gaps in the student population.
“The students that are coming to visit, it lets them learn about disabilities in a way that will impact their lives forever. You go to the grocery store and you see somebody in a power chair trying to reach something on the top of the shelf, do you act like they are not there, or do you offer to help?” Kelp said.
This week is also critical for Kelp’s students. “They don’t often make many friends, and it opens up their world. … They’re going to be seeing these people in the hallway and talking to them, even if it’s just, ‘Hello,’” she said.
“Just a general socialization in school. They can’t communicate their feelings or emotions sometimes, but it makes a huge difference to them and their parents. … It brings equality to all of us. Everybody just wants to be liked, to have a friend, to talk to people walking down the hall, to be noticed. That’s what people want. That’s really what it’s about.”
