Exceptional Learners Deserve Music, Too!

Dear Inclusion Advocates,

Thank you for your donations supporting GITC's work making musical learning accessible for students with special needs. We are so grateful you have been helping us to achieve new learning and abilities to serve. Today I am writing to share some good news with you.

This has been a summer of learning not just for students, but for our faculty and staff as well. We saw a big step forward in inclusive music for GITC, and thanks to some insightful and often challenging work, our 24 person faculty was able to teach children in cross-graded groups during our 5 week-long Summer Strummers Clubs to communicate, play, work, and learn though music successfully together.

In San Diego, as in other towns and cities, the local school district partners with a foundation to provide intensive summer school and summer enrichment opportunities that are free for families. This marked our fourth year participating in Level Up San Diego in schools throughout this district. But this year saw a sea level change.

Students with special needs who have Individualized Education Plans (IEPs), or 504 medical accommodation plans, or whose teachers identified them as being "at risk" because of psychological or academic-related problems, got a 5 week lead time to register for our clubs. Only after 5 weeks were children who had not been pre-approved permitted to register.. In the first 48 hours of registration for Priority 1 students in need, our clubs filled up. That meant every child enrolled needed academic and/or social-emotional support. We hired a special support provider called a PIF (personal independence facilitator) for each club to be sure we had at least one expert on hand. Then the district provided additional PIFs as time went on.

Eventually Priority 2 students got to fill spots that had been vacated by families that made other summer vacation plans.This meant these clubs with four exceptions became a healthy, inclusive mix of all learners. Two clubs were 100% Priority 1, and 2 clubs were added after the Priority 1 students had already enrolled, so had just 1 in four students with special needs.  

The children did not know anything about their rankings. They were a big team on a level playing field, learning to cooperate, communicate, ask for help, give help, and take each other as they were. Each group needed intensive social emotional and mindfulness work to accomplish those lofty goals. Talking circles, restorative practices, stress management techniques such as breathing excercises, naming feelings, and more gave the children powerful experiences in bringing their best selves to getting along and managing their own emotions.  So in the course of learning to sing, play ukuleles, and write their own songs, and participate in learning across the arts, these children began developing greater patience, tolerance, compassion, self control, and a willingness to overcome negative thinking in order to include others.

The children were asked every day to put caring to work. This was not easy. It took refined, master-level teaching and dedication on the part of our summer faculty. Chosen for their combination of maturity and creativity, empathy and clear leadership, this was a summer of real-time giving and learning. Everyone made music, wrote songs, and had deep experiences in visual art, puppetry, drama, and garden education together. They spent 100 hours together over 5 weeks. Kindness and inclusion were top goals, and no matter the challenges, in the end, each group was successful.

In my role as Executive Director, I became a coach when student behaviors pointed to difficulty in the group, and possible troubles at home. I had the honor of working with parents who needed to share with a listening ear about ongoing difficulties, pain points, and losses. Where our leaders saw extreme behaviors in our groups, parents needed support at home. Some parents were in crisis, caught in dangerous, precarious, and frightening situations. Others were struggling to make ends meet while feeling at a loss over how to help their children.

A few did not know their rights to ask for specific kinds of support from the school district. I learned that providing education, referrals for support systems, contact info for agencies connected to safe centers giving shelter and legal resources to abused women, and providing therapeutic resources would make a world of difference to the summer learning experience and to people's lives.

I am grateful to have learned decades ago that children's aggressive or sometime shocking or incomprehensible behaviors are not cured by judging or punishing them. Criticism only makes matters worse. Taking away what children love just hurts them more. But when their behaviors are taken as signs of a deeper crisis, and possibly reflections of unspoken or unmet needs, and even double-binding trying to please someone who hurts them, both children and parents benefit from receiving help untangling the knots that imprison them in negative actions and impulsive or destructive decisions. 

Summer gave us time to make a difference for these caring families who had gone the extra mile to sign their children up for a summer of music and arts.  This is GITC. This is the small organization you so graciously help. Thank you, in this high pressure world, for supporting us to give children - and families- a way to succeed through the beautiful, expressive power of music, and learning in community. We just cannot thank you enough!

With immeasurable gratitude,

Jess