Commitment to Inclusion

Happy 2025! I hope that the year brings you health, joy, and laughter.  For more than 2 years I have been absent from this blog and I have decided that 2025 is the time to recommit to this forum.  The reason for being absent from writing here and the reason for returning will be explored in the next couple of posts. For the past 2 years, in my role as Inclusion Coordinator at the American International School of Johannesburg, I have been leading the development of expanded services at our school to also be able to meet the needs of students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. It has been a challenging and exciting process that has been all consuming.  As people learn about what we have been doing, they are reaching out to learn more, so I suspect there is an interest and an audience for this content.  In the coming posts, I will endeavour to chronicle the work we have done.  It is only a narrative of our AISJ journey that perhaps others will find helpful, it is by no means THE way to do this work, it is just how we did it in our context.  I hope it inspires and illuminates.

A little history and context

When Dr. Jeremy Moore joined AISJ as the new director under COVID in August 2020, among his priorities besides running a school in a pandemic, was to revisit the schools purpose, mission and vision. With input from the Board, parents, leadership, teachers, staff, students and other members of the wider AISJ community, we engaged in a Voices to Vision process to identify who we are as a school and what we aspire to be. By the end of that first year, AISJ had rewritten its purpose, mission, vision, and community principals.  You can read about the work here on our website and see the final product that has been guiding the school’s decision making since. A snapshot of our compass is also pictured below.

Step 1: The commitment

I start there, because the newly articulated purpose, vision, mission and community principals make it clear that we would be hypocritical and dishonest if we were not working towards the inclusion of individuals with a wider range of disability and neurodiversity.  It was a glaring hole in our programming.  Board Chair Carolynn Pettit and Board Member Marissa Mauer agreed and began to champion the work at the Board level. With encouragement and support from our U.S. Department of Overseas School Regional Education Officer Tim Stuart, the Board began to explore this possibility.  In August 2022, the Board and Senior Leadership Team identified expanding inclusion as a key priority to explore and by the December Board Meeting, full Board approval was given to begin the work of planning for an increase of services at AISJ. The key motivation was to keep families together and more closely live our mission as a school.

The Fun Begins

Throughout January to June of 2023 budgets were created, consultants were explored, we hosted the first SENIA Conference in Africa, and a group of committed individuals was formed to lead the work. The Working Group for Inclusion consisted of representatives from different divisions and included myself, our HIgh School Principal, the Director of Teaching and Learning, an ES LS Teacher, a HS LS Teacher, a counselor, an ES class Teacher and an MS Language Arts Teacher. We chose Kristen Pelletier from Next Frontier Inclusion to help us with the work. 

The working group met with Kristen virtually in early June 2023 for the first time to launch our work.  In that meeting we outlined our goals, dove into the various contexts for language with which we would engage guided by the NFI publication Embracing Extraordinary, and set the stage for the key work ahead in the 2023-2024 school year.  I will begin to discuss that in the next post.