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 honed in on students deemed to be their responsibility.
Instead of keeping children with disabilities in classrooms and bringing help to them, those students were often pulled 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, Nebraska, where Ms. Jolliffe is now assistant principal, that’s no longer the case. In classrooms across the school, children of all abilities learn side by side. Special education teachers and paraprofessionals spend hours in the same classrooms to provide support to students who may need it. All teachers spend time planning together to figure out how to support every student who walks through their door.
Why We Wrote This
Nebraska is a leader in the U.S. in terms of classroom inclusion for students with disabilities. What does that mean for their academic success?
“Kids don’t earn their way into a general ed classroom. That’s where they belong,” says Wendy Kemling-Horner, executive director of student services at Scottsbluff Public Schools, home to Westmoor and seven other schools that serve 3,500 students in western Nebraska.
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. In 2022, faced with dismal outcomes for students with disabilities and pandemic-related gaps, the state launched a program called “Journey to Inclusion” to teach educators about keeping students with disabilities and other children together and promote proven strategies to improve it.
Nebraska has poured nearly $1 million of its federal COVID-19 aid into this effort to make sure students with disabilities aren’t just sitting in general education classrooms, but making academic progress and feeling included. If children need additional help, it now largely happens right in those classes.
At a time when the concept of inclusion raises the ire of the Trump administration – with research that includes the words inclusion or disability under federal scrutiny – Nebraska is a case study of what can happen when schools prioritize doing inclusion in ways research says helps all students learn. As part of their shift, state officials have pushed for more co-teaching, where a general education teacher and a special education teacher work together in the same classroom. The state provided training sessions and workshops for administrators and general education teachers so they understood they have a responsibility to students with disabilities. They also sent coaches from SPED Strategies, a national organization that helps districts roll out inclusion, into schools across the state to train and help teachers roll out new techniques.
There is still room for Nebraska’s schools to better serve students with disabilities, and parents and advocates have highlighted issues with other parts of the state’s special education services. But there has been significant progress when it comes to improving teacher and administrator knowledge of how to do inclusion successfully, educators say. So far, at least half of the districts in the state have been trained by SPED Strategies, and nine are working directly with the organization for personalized coaching. Other schools or districts have adopted select aspects of inclusive education.
Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report
Results in Nebraska
The state is starting to reap the benefits. Between 2021 and 2024, the percentage of Nebraska’s third grade students with disabilities who were proficient in math increased from 18% to 29%. In 2021, 65% of special education students graduated in four years, compared to the state average of almost 88%. By 2024, the graduation rate for special education students was nearly 70%.
Some of this success echoes research that has found more progress in reading and math for children with disabilities in inclusive settings, as well as a positive effect on academic and social skills. Research has found inclusion makes students with disabilities more likely to graduate on time and can boost attendance and cut discipline referrals.
Nebraska is something of an anomaly for prioritizing inclusion across the state. Nationwide, students with disabilities spend large portions of their days in segregated settings, even though federal law says they should be educated with their general education peers “to the maximum extent appropriate.” States are required to report to the federal government how many students spend 80% or more of their day in general education classrooms.
Many states fall short of this goal even with students in kindergarten, according to a review of federal data by The Hechinger Report. Across the nation, 29% of 5- and 6-year-olds with disabilities do not spend 80% of their days with general education peers. In New Jersey, which has the lowest inclusion rate, it’s 53%. By contrast, in Nebraska, 88% of kids are included in general education classrooms the vast majority of their day. It’s the second-highest inclusion rate in the U.S. for that age group.
High exclusion rates in the early years signal something is wrong with how districts view young students with disabilities, experts say. “I think it’s very problematic when we decide immediately when a student comes into kindergarten that they need to be in a self-contained placement,” said Jordan Lukins, assistant teaching professor at North Carolina State’s College of Education. “There’s still this kind of outdated idea of, ‘Well, they’ll learn better in a smaller setting, or with a teacher who’s got different training.’”
Meeting a range of needs
Research has found the quality of inclusion, particularly how schools plan and set up classrooms, can make a huge difference. Some educators have said classrooms lack resources and support for students with disabilities. Earlier this year, a small group of academics questioned whether the evidence really proves inclusion works, and pointed out that in some states with high inclusion rates, test scores have declined.
Nebraska has long had better rates of inclusion than other states, even though the state wasn’t specifically focused on improving it until recently, says Amy Rhone, state director of Nebraska’s Office of Special Education. Still, years of poor outcomes for special education students indicated to Dr. Rhone and other state officials that the quality of instruction in inclusive classrooms has been lacking.
As state officials started talking to school officials and educators to dig into problematic practices, they realized a lot of children with learning disabilities, like dyslexia, were being pulled out of their general education setting for specialized reading instruction with special education teachers. Without the training in how to teach reading, those teachers were in many cases using “homemade materials” that weren’t effective, says Dr. Rhone. While out of class, students missed lessons that put them further behind, she added.
This, in part, inspired the state to train all pre-K through third grade teachers, including special education teachers, in evidence-based reading instruction. They encouraged educators in subjects like physical education and music to also take the literacy training. The state published guides for teachers to explain what research-based inclusion looks like and introduced strategies teachers can use to help learners with different needs, like visual schedules and flexible seating options.
These strategies are key to making inclusion work as well as possible and can benefit all children, says George Theoharis, a professor of inclusive elementary and early childhood education at Syracuse University. “It’s about constructing that space that’s supportive, a process for trying to meet a range of needs, whether kids have disabilities or not.”
A new path in Scottsbluff
Many of these strategies are evident at Westmoor and across schools in Scottsbluff, a rural community home to a large sugar factory and known for its agriculture. But this hasn’t always been the case. As recently as a decade ago, most of Scottsbluff’s elementary students with more severe disabilities were funneled to one specific school that was most accessible for students with physical disabilities.
About seven years ago, district leaders started their own inclusion push. They decided to enroll students with more severe needs in all of the elementary schools, not just one building, and improve inclusion across grade levels. The shift was partly inspired by feedback from parents. Several years ago, for instance, one mother pointed out that though her child spent significant time in general education classrooms, she had few friends or invitations to see peers outside of school. Scottsbluff’s administrators realized they were falling short of meaningful inclusion. “That was tough to hear,” Dr. Kemling-Horner says.
Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report
When the state announced its new initiative in 2022, Scottsbluff was one of the first districts to jump on board and embrace new guidance from the state. They added a 30- to 40-minute intervention block each day so all children can get help without missing key lessons. They began relying more on co-teaching, rather than pulling children with disabilities out of the classroom to work with special education instructors; and they started providing joint planning time for special education and general education teachers, to nurture collaboration. The district encouraged inclusion-friendly strategies for teachers, like offering students multiple options for showing understanding of concepts and creating different work spaces in the classroom.
This is visible at all levels: At the high school, a “peer para” program that started in 2022 pairs trained students with a peer with a disability to make sure students have added support and an advocate in class. A general education classroom at Westmoor Elementary now may have children with cognitive disabilities, learning disabilities, and visual or hearing impairments spending substantial time – if not the whole day – with their peers.
The school is trying to move away from “teachers performing on an island,” says Ms. Jolliffe, who is scheduled to take over as principal at Westmoor in the fall. “It’s the collaboration between the special ed teacher and the classroom teacher that makes [inclusion] successful.”
The inclusive push has reached the district’s preschool program as well. That year is when children are especially welcoming of differences, educators here say. “At this age group, a lot of times the kids don’t even notice,” says Jeanne Anderson, a veteran teacher. “As they grow older and move through the grades it’s just something they’re used to.”
“All kids are our kids”
On a recent winter morning inside Ms. Anderson’s classroom, five children sat cozily on a carpet as Ms. Anderson reviewed the “big” vocabulary words they had recently learned. The class was missing several students because of a snowstorm the day before, but Ms. Anderson forged ahead, supported by two other teachers.
“What’s our very favorite big word? Our very first one?” she asked.
“Flabbergasted!” a child called out.
Ms. Anderson says despite training, inclusion can still be hard in practice, especially when it comes to making the experience equal for all. Some children have more intensive needs and may require more time and energy from a teacher regardless of how much training that teacher has had.
Still, Scottsbluff has already seen promising results, echoing state trends. Between 2022 and 2024, the proportion of special education students across all grades proficient in both math and English language arts doubled. “Our kids are getting what they need at the moment that they need it,” says Dr. Kemling-Horner. “We’re not waiting for kids [with disabilities] to fail and then sending them somewhere else to learn.”
While there is progress statewide, Dr. Rhone says the rollout is still uneven. Some districts, especially those that are smaller and more rural, may lack staffing and resources to take up a new vision of inclusion. Parents recently accused some large districts of continuing to segregate children with disabilities too much. Special education teachers, in particular, are in short supply. These shortages are in part responsible for some Nebraska school districts denying high numbers of transfer applications from students with disabilities who live outside district boundaries, according to a recent investigation by Nebraska’s Flatwater Free Press and The 74.
Scottsbluff is waiting to see how potential federal funding cuts and the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs will affect them. In early April, the state lost $9 million in unspent pandemic recovery aid, which has paid for the state’s inclusion efforts. State and district leaders say they hope the type of inclusion they’re prioritizing is not what federal officials want to end, as the changes may be key to making sure more students are ready for education, work, and life after high school.
“Every educator is taking more ownership for kids,” says Dr. Rhone. “I think we have real pockets of excellence across our state that are saying, ‘Nope, all kids are our kids.’”
This story about Nebraska special education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
