OTS 176: Supporting Students with Extensive Support Needs: Understanding the Challenge
- Jayson Davies
- May 19
- 27 min read
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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 176 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.
Ever wondered how school-based OTs can meaningfully support students with extensive support needs?
Supporting students with extensive support needs has long been one of the most challenging and under-resourced areas of school-based OT.
In this first of a two-part episode, Dr. Savitha Sundar joins Jayson to unpack the history, systemic influences, and practitioner struggles that shape how services are delivered in special education classrooms today. From redefining outdated language to exploring how friendships and peer modeling can shift trajectories, this episode is a powerful reflection on the ethical and practical realities of inclusive education.
This episode sets the foundation for building more inclusive school communities—and why occupational therapists play a key role in leading that change.
🎧 Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll move into actionable strategies and systemic shifts.
Listen now to learn the following objectives:
Learners will reflect on the historical and systemic factors that have contributed to the segregation of students with extensive support needs in school settings.
Learners will identify challenges OTPs face when serving students in self-contained classrooms and how these challenges impact practice.
Learners will understand the evolving terminology and research around inclusive education and how it relates to the role of school-based OTPs.
Guest(s) Bio
Savitha Sundar PhD, OTR/L.
Savitha Sundar has served in public schools for over 17 years across three states, primarily supporting students with extensive support needs in self-contained classrooms. Her research focuses on the role of school-based occupational therapy in bridging the research-to-practice gap in inclusive education. For five years, Savitha served as an executive board member and later as a partnerships officer for a national nonprofit organization--Changing Perspectives, focused on promoting inclusive practices and social-emotional learning.
Savitha teaches entry-level OTD students during the summer at Texas Woman’s University and has mentored more than a dozen students in school-based practice. She also hosts the podcast Inclusive Occupations – Sharing Stories of Not Just Being Invited to the Party but Dancing. Through the podcast, she amplifies the voices of educators, researchers, and individuals with disabilities working to build authentically inclusive learning communities.
Quotes
“It's so meaningful, the power that a little bit of social presence can bring to education, leisure, and play skills. And that's just really powerful.”
-Jayson Davies, M.A., OTR/L
“I got 186 responses. And nearly the majority of the OTs said that at least 40% of their caseload are students with extensive support needs.”
-Savitha Sundar PhD, OTR/L
“The need for us to recognize that it's the support needs of the student that is where the focus should be and not on the student's disability…then our intervention will also focus on the environmental factors, not just the person's inability to do things."
-Savitha Sundar PhD, OTR/L
Resources
👉 Inclusive Occupations Podcast by Savitha Sundar
👉 Changing Perspectives – A nonprofit supporting inclusive practices and social-emotional learning in schools.
👉 Every Moment Counts – Structured approaches to promoting social participation and comfort for all students.
👉 NTACT:C Predictors of Post-School Success – Evidence-based practices that improve post-secondary outcomes, including the role of inclusion and goal setting.
👉 Effecting Change in School-Based Practice: Fostering Social Inclusion in a Co-occupation Program (OT Practice Article by Dr. Sundar - AOTA membership required)
👉 Interventions and measures of social inclusion for students with extensive support needs in K-12 schools: A scoping review (Article by Dr. Sundar -Journal of Intellectual Disabilities)
👉 Interoception Program-guide for mindful self regulation
👉 Sensory Integration Program - Ayres SI
Episode Transcript
Expand to view the full episode transcript.
Jayson Davies
Hey there, and welcome to episode 176 of the OT school house podcast. I am your host, as always, Jayson Davies, and today, we are diving into a topic that many of you have reached out to me about over several years, and that is how we as school based ot practitioners, of course, can better support students with extensive support needs now, whether it's figuring out how to provide meaningful services in various types of classrooms, or feeling unsure about how to write truly inclusive goals, or maybe even just wondering how to make a bigger impact within our schools, this is a challenge that has weighed on school based ot practitioners ever since I got into the field, and probably for much longer than that. That's why I'm thrilled to be joined today by Dr Savita Sundar. Dr Sundar is someone who I have known for several years now through the OT school house, but she recently completed her PhD, and she has a lot of information to share with us. Savita has served in the public schools for over 17 years across three different states, so she has seen what school based occupational therapy can look like in various areas. She has primarily supported students with extensive support needs, as she'll share in a little bit during her time as a school based ot both in practice and through her research, Savita has put a spotlight on bridging the research to practice gap and inclusive education through occupational therapy. In addition to her role as a school based occupational therapist, Savitha teaches at Texas Woman's University, mentors emerging ot practitioners and hosts the inclusive occupations podcast, where she helps to share the positive impact inclusion can have on individuals. Now our conversation ended up being a little bit longer than we thought it would be, but that's because we had so much to talk about in this episode. So in this first episode of a two part conversation, Savitha is going to lay out the foundation for what it really means to support students with extensive support needs, not just clinically, but also ethically and systemically. We talk about the history of segregated services, how peer interactions and friendships can reshape outcomes, and what we need to reconsider in our own training and mindsets. It's the kind of episode that invites reflection and re imagining. And then in Episode 177 part two of our conversation, we'll discuss more the practical application of supporting students with extensive support needs to promote inclusion. Now this is a topic that I've wanted to address here on the podcast for a long time. It is one of our most requested episode topics, and I am thrilled that Dr Sundar was willing to have this real conversation with us. So let's welcome Dr Sundar to the podcast and go ahead and get started.
Amazing Narrator
Hello and welcome to the OT school house podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy tips, interviews and professional development. Now to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies class is officially in session.
Jayson Davies
Dr Sundar, how are you doing this afternoon?
Savitha Sundar
Doing great. Hi, Jayson, so good to be here.
Jayson Davies
Hi. Are you getting used to that doctor in front of your name yet?
Savitha Sundar
Not completely. Since I'm still a school practitioner, I go by Ms s with most of my kids, it's a little like, I have to get used to this.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, it's not very often.
Savitha Sundar
Yeah, has its value. You know, sometimes use that, but I have to get used to it and comfortably.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, it's definitely more for the conferences and the podcast and the webinars of the world than it is for working with our kids in the school. So I imagine it will take some time. But yeah, thank you so much for being here. Really happy to have you and really excited to have this conversation with you about supporting our students with extensive needs like this is something that a lot of people have questions about. A lot of people feel very uncomfortable, and I think we're going to talk about that. So I first want to ask you is how you or why you decided to go down this route of researching the support that occupational therapy practitioners provide to students with extensive support needs.
Savitha Sundar
Yeah, that's a great intro question, because, you know, it happened very organically for me. I started in school practice. I always wanted to be in pediatric practice, and I entered school practice probably of my 20 years, as in 24 years as an OT I've spent the majority of them in school setting, and I happened to be placed as a as a contract therapist who was dependent on a visa sponsorship in a program in the Bay Area. When we moved to Bay Area in 2012 No 2008 in this program that exclusively is. Supported students with extensive support needs. So in the Bay Area California, we have the county programs, and I'm not sure if it's the same in Southern California as well, but a lot of big school district big urban communities have this system where students who have high support needs are usually supported by an external program, because the school districts may be relatively small, or they don't have the resources. So they combine several districts, and they create these programs where they get more funding from the federal government, and they end up giving them more services and, you know, supports and all kinds of things, and that was the justification for them to be moved into a separate program outside their home school. So when I worked there, I, you know, did my traditional ot stuff, whatever, you know, we've been trained to do. And just over the course of time, I happened to be working with some of these amazing teachers who went out of their way to enable friendships for kids in their self contained classrooms. They connected with a gen ed teacher, they arranged for peer buddies. They did all these things. And every time I saw my kids in that space, I felt like I saw a different side of them come out, you know, like they showed us things that you know, that we never got to see in our regular school day. And I'd like to share this one story that I think is very powerful, because it was my turning point. So in one of these self contained classrooms, the K 2k, to 3k, to two self contained classroom, we had a student. We had tried a lot to get him to feed himself, and over the years, he had started with us in preschool, and he wasn't walking, he wasn't using any communication, wasn't touching anything. He'd come a long way, but all the way up to second grade, he wasn't feeding himself. Wasn't a motor problem. We couldn't tell if it was a sensory issue that we hadn't detected yet, but when some of his peers came into the classroom. He adored those girls, the older girls, who came into the classroom to partner and play with our students. And when one of the girls came in and saw him with his food and said, Oh, Jimmy, you have yogurt. His name is not Jimmy. So Jimmy, you have yogurt. I have yogurt too. Let's eat. And so she just sat next to him and started eating. And then he started feeding himself like he's been doing that forever. And we were like, and we were like, Oh my gosh. So this kid knew all along. He wasn't eating at home, he wasn't eating at school. It was one of his IEP goals that he would feed himself. And here he was just out of that peer pressure, or, you know, just to feel like he belonged to this, this group, he started feeding himself, and it was an aha moment for me. And then I couldn't unsee it, like I saw so many situations where kids, we were trying to walk them in their Walker to go one place to another, but when they were in the playground, they were automatically geared towards people they were attracted to. And, you know, there were some kids who were just more friendly with our students in the in the SDCs, and they would try to respond to them so much better than they did. So that became my focus in my practice. I tried to bring in peers to be part of my therapy sessions. I started doing groups with Gen Ed peers whenever I could. Wasn't always possible, and then moved on to and there was a lot of support and encouragement to do this as well in the in the school. So that was my understanding of inclusion. I'm going to make these pure relationships possible for these students with extensive support needs. And I felt that was the most meaningful thing I can do to them, for their future and even for their present, to build a community that understands them and that can, you know, create a better world for them, basically. So that's how I started. My interest in this population, inclusion and extensive support needs came, and I'm sorry I probably gave you a long winded answer to this.
Jayson Davies
No, it's a great start. It's a great start, and it makes me think of the OT practice framework, right? Like we have these various occupations that we always talk about, play, leisure, education, ADLs, all that fun stuff, but, but we don't always consider the social aspect involved with each and every single one of those occupations. And it's so meaningful the power that a little bit of social presence can bring to education, to leisure and play skills, and that's just really powerful.
Savitha Sundar
Yeah, definitely.
Jayson Davies
Okay, as I mentioned, as we kind of, we're just getting started. A lot of therapists have, it's almost to a degree, it's an ethical conundrum, because, you know, we are ingrained, especially over the last 1015, years in OT school, about the power of inclusivity and inclusion. But then we get into the real world, and we do see these programs like you were talking about earlier in the Bay Area, down here as well in Southern California. I know it exists across the country. Century, where these students are in a separate classroom, sometimes they're in a complete separate school, because, as you mentioned, Wright county programs are often in like one school, and sometimes kids have to ride a bus an hour to get to those programs. And so I guess the question here is, how did it make you feel when you transitioned from student into these programs and started to understand this difference from what we have been taught in OT school? And then, you know, obviously you just talked a little bit about your experience. But then let's start to move on to Okay, well, what you were going to do about it, but first, I just want to get your idea of like, idea of like that first time you realized that these inclusive practices weren't exactly happening. How did that make you feel?
Savitha Sundar
I think as new practitioners coming into the into practice, we're really very focused on getting a job and keeping that job. Okay, yeah, we yeah, we don't want to go in and rock the boat and do anything like, Oh, my ot program taught me this. And I'm not, I'm not going to do this handwriting practice. That's not what OTs are for. I don't think in OT school, they really gave us any training on how to teach handwriting to kids. We learned it over the course of our practice. We found that this is a big need. And then we attend all these continuing ed courses, and then so we come with that mindset into practice. And I was the same too. I wanted to come in. I wanted to feel like I fit in and I belong, and people liked me, and they listened to me and everything. And once you get comfortable in that position, and then you see this very important need, and you start addressing it in a very natural way. And then everything falls in place. This is what I went to OT school for, right that I address the social environment, that address the physical environment, that I address the activity, the occupation. I don't do a task analysis. I do an occupational analysis, which includes us looking into the personal factors, the environmental factors, the performance, skills, the performance, you know, the roles, rituals, habits, all of those areas we look into the whole picture to see how a person is successfully participating in an occupation. And when we try to include a student in an environment that has the best opportunities for them, then I think that ot lens just comes in, and it's like, this is my role in schools. You know, that was my aha moment, and that's what led me to sort of obsessively pursue this area, like I spent five and a half years in my PhD looking into this area. How can I make it most meaningful to myself and to my ot practice? Because it just feels so right. And a lot of therapists resonate with me, and a lot of therapists are like, Oh my gosh, this is just doesn't make any sense. So I feel like this both these perspectives, but to me, it feels like we try to articulate our who we are in schools, right? Or we're not motor specialists. We're not handwriting specialists. We're not, you know, there's no, no role that really pulls in all our skills and our resources, you know, and to enable inclusion, to be an access professional, that pulls in all our true ot background in place, and it's just like a big wow. This is what we need. We should be doing. And I guess so it's a journey.
Jayson Davies
No totally understand. And one of the things that I've been kind of talking a lot about recently is the idea that it's like a blessing and a curse, that people don't know what we do in the schools, because it's a curse. No one knows what we do. But it can also be a blessing, because we can be the one to show them, and a lot of people don't know what OTs do, and therefore whatever we do is what they're going to know as OT. And so I think you know that's that's the blessing of it. If we want it to be handwriting, then we can focus on handwriting, but if we want ot to be about more than handwriting, then we can show them that OT is more than handwriting. So.
Savitha Sundar
And every school district is so different. I worked in so many different districts now in so many different states, and every school is so different, and some administrators have already set the stage with OTs role as fine motor and handwriting, like every other area is taken by somebody else. So it's so hard when you are put in that position to convince the administration no we can do more. So it has to happen both ways. You know, the admins have to be open to learn what else OTs can do, and OTs have to kind of do the uphill battle for a while to show them what else we can do. So yeah, and people have huge caseloads and they don't have the time to do anything except check off IEP mandates, then it's very, very hard.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, all right, continuing down supporting students with extensive support needs. At what point did you start to think to yourself, Okay, I am starting to support these students. I am seeing how I can support. Whether they're in a county program or if the district hasn't been housed. But at what point did you think to yourself, like, hey, there's got to be research about this, or, oh my goodness, there isn't research about this. And what did you start to figure out as you were looking into that research?
Savitha Sundar
Yeah, so my friends and I have always struggled with this. Any conference we go to, they tend to talk about the kids who are not the kind of kids we see in our county programs, right? Okay? And they tend to talk about the sort of the higher functioning as it was called before, or the low support needs students, as we call rightly better now, the focus has always been on we never found anything that really catered to the students. Like I went, I wanted to go get my si certification, and I went there, and the whole we were, like, getting so many referrals. This is back in 2012 so many referrals for addressing sensory needs. And then I'm like, Okay, I need to understand more about Si, and I go take the training and and the whole of Si, the IRS si training focused on students, I mean, kids who had milder who didn't have cognitive disabilities or didn't have intellectual disabilities. That was the focus of the training that I went to. And so it just puzzled me. Like, why is there so little focus on and when I looked into the literature, there was one article from 2004 that talked about OT and students with severe disabilities. So OT and students with severe disabilities in the education context, I could not identify an article at all in my entire like, I've done a lot of literature search, and over the years, we just could not find anything with all these three combined. They talk about it in terms of, like a diagnosis. You can see OT and autism, OT and intellectual but then you know, intellectual disability is also a range. Autism is a range, right? The kids who are the districts are not able to provide FAPE and send to accounting program, those kids, the ones on the ends of the spectrum, are we focusing on them? No, and that just really made me feel sad, because those 100% of my caseload were these students. So did I your question?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, and you brought up a great point too, because, like, I think probably just about everyone listening to this podcast episode right now has been in a professional development training where, in the back of their mind they're listening to a speaker and wondering, does this program support the kids that I work with and we, I think we've all been there, right? We've been listening to a training, whether it's handwriting training and executive functioning training, no sensory processing training, whatever it might be, but we just kind of have that, that little inkling in the back of our mind, like, is this training for my the population that I work with? And that's really hard when you come to grasp that you're in a training and it's not actually for the population that you work with, it kind of lets you down a little bit totally. So I totally understand that.
Savitha Sundar
And the other thing is, the medical model with which we have been trained over the years makes us want to only address the student. And the whole IEP, the whole of special ed, is set up to retrofit these kids into general education, right into the normal world. So the world was not designed with people with disabilities in the first place. Only very recent. Only 50 years ago, we started including them in our educational system, so you can and when, and all our services, all our training, has been in that deficit focused model. And I think OT is very progressive in that way that we are probably one of the few that really look into the person, the environment and the occupation when it comes to participation, right? So yeah, the thing is, we can't if we identify these problems there in the environment, and we have very little control over what we can do in these environment and these systems, right? So maybe that's why, yeah, don't talk about it much?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, before, I want to get more in depth into our conversation today, I do want to ask you about a topic, or just it's not really too much of a topic, but I want to know how you came up with a specific language that you did. You used the language students with extensive support needs. And I want to ask this because I think you know it's, it's kind of commonplace right now to be very careful about how we use language, especially in IEPs, and when we're talking about students with disabilities. And so I wanted to ask you, did that come from articles that you reviewed within OT, outside of OT? Did you make it up on your own? Where did that come from?
Savitha Sundar
All outside of OT, for sure, education, all the research that I the information I could get for my research, was all from education, educational psychology, educational literature, was where I went to. And we used to use the term mod severe in California. So when I started my PhD in 2019 The term was still. Severe disabilities, right? And then as I went along, I think the awareness also increased, and the and the need for us to recognize that it's the support needs of the student that is where the focus should be, and not on the student's disability the students functioning from saying high functioning or low functioning to high support needs or low support needs and high support needs that places the need for change outside the individual, then our intervention will also focus on the environmental factors, not just the person's inability to do things. Yeah, so I think that's why the term is used now a lot in the literature. I think that's the most so the way it's defined in the literature was, I think in 2017 tob came up with that definition, and she says there are students who it's not a very crystal clear definition, either, but this is what we're trying to use in the literature, in research with this population, mostly students who may have a diagnosis of autism, intellectual disability, or multiple disabilities, who tend to have needs across multiple domains of school participation, and who most often will qualify for their state's alternate assessments based on alternate achievement standards. So and they represent one to 3% one to 2% of the 53 million students who are educated in the American public school system, a very small percentage.
Jayson Davies
Wow. So, yeah, okay, very small percentage.
Savitha Sundar
This is, this is what I wanted to say. So when I started, 100% of the students I supported were that one to 3% of the population. So I wanted to find out, how is it with other OTs? Do they only work with kids who are in general education settings, or they work little bit with kids who are in self contained classrooms? What does your caseload look like? And I put out a survey on Facebook, and it was just a one question survey, mark one of the five options, what percentage of your caseload involves students with extensive support needs, and this is what I mean by extensive support needs, and the kids who also spend I also added the fact that they spend the majority of their day outside general education settings, and in a day or two, I got 186 responses, and nearly the majority of the OT said that at least 40% of their caseload are students with extensive support needs. Wow. So. And then I did an IRB approved survey, and I had 156 OTs who took that survey, and the result was exactly the same. And if, when I go to a presentation and I put that question among the at the audience, and it's very similar. And I look at my own caseload now, more than 50% of the students I support are students with extensive support needs. So I mean, the rationale is so different from in different places, but they tend to have IEPs, and they have a more explicit, obvious need for ot sometimes. But then again, ot comes like, okay, they are too severe to benefit from ot because we're working on handwriting, and therefore this is not something that we can address, or they are too high functioning. And then we don't work with the kids who are in gen ed classrooms, and we only work with kids who are in self contained classrooms. So what lenses do you look at? How you provide services is where the determination comes?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, wow. So a good majority of us are working with these students, yet many of us are probably also questioning how we're actually supposed to be supporting these students. You mentioned your survey, not the one question survey, but the follow up survey that you did, what was some of your goals with that and what were some of the outcomes that you found from that survey?
Savitha Sundar
So the survey study was looking into both special education teachers who work with students with extensive support needs and OTs who work with students with extensive support needs, looking at, what do you like? The main question of the survey was to find if there is a relationship between attitudes and efforts. Like, if your attitude towards inclusion of these students is high, then is it likely that you would have more put more efforts to support inclusion in your school? That was my big question. But part of the study was all these other questions. And one of the question was like, What do OTs work with this population? What do you address with this population? And the results were not surprising at all. The majority of them mentioned fine motor handwriting, and then it went on to sensory self regulation, sensory regulation, and then moved to ADLs, and then social participation. And then they were like, vocational, pre vocational. All of those were some of the little bars in the findings. So we the what, what I was hoping I would know, or what I didn't know is if these are the areas, and it was an open ended question, like, what do you work with your students? And then, you know, based on their. Responses. I categorize the responses, and what I don't know is, how do these engender access to lesser restrictive environments, right? How does it give you how does, how do you addressing fine motor lead to the desired outcome that you expect from the student? How does it lead to inclusion? That's something we don't know, right? And if we don't even know if that's a focus of our interventions, maybe therapists work on it with a purpose, like, okay, so this kid is in the general education classroom, and they're supposed to put their things in the locker, and therefore we need to work on opening and closing the locker. And so I'm working on this fine motor skill. Then I understand this is for the purpose of inclusion. Yeah, right. But if you're just working on stringing beads, or you're working on your pencil grip, or you're working on handwriting, for that matter, right, making all the letters legible, how does that lead this kid to access grade appropriate knowledge and express grade appropriate understanding of grade appropriate content.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, you know, and I've struggled with this too, it's like, Well, are we working on a skill? And is that skill or, I mean, I'm working on a skill. Is that skill going to support inclusion? Sometimes I think about that, and sometimes I'm not purposefully thinking about the inclusion aspect. And I talk about that because should we be, should we be either a, creating specific goals related to inclusion, or B, at least, at the very least, be writing our goals, to a degree, with the idea of inclusion in place. I don't know if you have thoughts on that.
Savitha Sundar
Absolutely, and I think the whole special ed team should be working on that. So special education and related services are there to support this kid Access General Education, environments and experiences. That's the purpose of, I don't think you would disagree with me, or anybody would disagree with me. And I like to use, okay, and you may have, I don't know if you've already, I think somebody in your podcast also shared this, the National Association for transition, the ntac, or National Collaborative for transition, something. So the N taxi, the collaborative, whatever, I'll share the information with you. So they have come up with this in school predictors of post school success, right? You know what I'm talking about, right? So if you look at those predictors, there are two of them that are research based across education and employment and independent living. One of them is goal setting, and the second is inclusion in general education. Those are the only two research based across all three areas, and so far, there is no research that says there is a clear advantage of a separate class over a general education classroom for a student, for any child, including students with extensive support needs. And I mean, I always know as a researcher that no research is 100% everything is very contextual, very situational, but it's something for us to consider that this is a good and, you know, I I've been looking for an analogy to explain this, and this is the closest I can come with. You can take a plant, right, and you can put that plant inside the house. You can take a plant that's supposed to be outside and put the plant inside the house. You can give it artificial light, you can give it all the fertilizer. You can do everything, but unless you put the plant where it has to be, you can never meet the needs of the plant in a different setting. And the other analogy I came up with is it's from a Buddhist it's from a Buddhist saying where, like wisdom and compassion are two wings of a bird, without which the bird will fly in circles. And the one I use is access and placement are like two wings of a bird without one, the bird will tend to fly in circles. So if you are providing placement but you're not providing access, meaningful access and belonging, then that's not inclusion. And if you're providing access in a self contained classroom to grade appropriate instruction or whatever. That also is not inclusion, because by the nature of the program, a student is not exposed to what a child without disability will will be exposed to, will get just by the nature of exposure, it's coming from presuming that these kids just because they cannot tell you what they know, we assume that they don't understand, but our job is to give them the knowledge and give them the tools to express themselves most effectively, most functionally, right? So I think, yeah, I almost forgot your question, but that.
Jayson Davies
That is totally fine. Who? No, no, no, you're fine. My favorite IEP, my favorite part of the IEP, and I say this somewhat sarcastically, is that little piece that says the percentage that a student is in general education and in those programs that I've worked with, you know, the county programs, or even the in house district programs that operate similar to county extensive support needs program that you were mentioning earlier, there always has to be that percentage that the student is in general education. And for these programs, it would often range from like zero to 10% and if it was 10% the 10% usually referred to the time that the classroom was in the cafeteria and the time that the classroom was at recess. But if you look a little bit more in depth, you would find that yes, the classroom was going to the cafeteria with their general education peers. However, the caveat is that they were sitting at their own table. They were in the cafeteria, but they were definitely not part of the cafeteria. And same thing when you go out to recess, yes, they're out there with their peers, but they're still kind of have their own little area out at recess.
Savitha Sundar
They play with higher educators and teachers
Jayson Davies
Exactly, exactly. So I guess my question here is, what does authentic inclusion look like in a school setting, beyond just having the student in the same area as the general education population.
Savitha Sundar
Authentic inclusion must address all three dimensions of inclusion, which is the physical dimension, physically being there, second, socially, having A sense of belonging, where others know about you. And when it comes to kids with communication challenges and social challenges, I think the bigger step has to be taken. You can't really meet in the middle. And we've tried a lot pushing our kids to come to the middle. A lot of times the gen ed kids have to come a little bit further beyond the middle to reach to our kids, and that's the nature of society. That's that's the society we live in, and that's the society we want to be in in the future too, right? So authentic inclusion will take efforts addressing that social dimension of belonging. Okay? Everybody understands the student. The student has friends, people know them by name. Being in the cafeteria like, that's the thing, right? We can always come up with excuses. We don't have enough staff. We don't have enough, you know, money, to make this happen. And, you know, oh, the Gen, ed community is not going the parents are not going to accept it. All of these excuses can come in. It's very easy to say no, because you can always cite a lot of reasons, but if you say yes, you may not get 100% but at least you'll do a little bit better. At least two students will have the opportunity, and then you'll see how that works out, and then you'll be inspired to bring in more peers are such powerful resources in the class, you know, they can do a lot for us, and I've also seen a lot of students don't even appear to be students with extensive support needs, because they've always been in a general education setting, and therefore they don't exhibit that kind of a need, because it's just it's I've heard this from experts, and I have seen this myself. I can look like that is why this whole continuum of placement, least restrictive environment statement, all of this is so subjective to interpretation, right? So what the same student can be in in Texas and can be fully included, and the same student can be in Oregon and be in a special education classroom. I'm just giving an example of two different states, but, you know, or in the same same state, you can be in a different district and be fully included, because the team feels that's the LRE, whereas in another place they feel like, oh, we have, we have a really nice program, a really nice, self contained a special education program with all the resources, and you market that program for The kids. So it's really not the students need. It's what we are capable of doing or our mindset that is 100%
Jayson Davies
true, and the fact that the LRE is not really well defined and can change from any given IEP to the next IEP sometimes too, like I could, I could manipulate and like what the LRE means for any specific situation that I really need it to mean.
Savitha Sundar
Yeah, yeah. We need to acknowledge that. You know? We need to acknowledge that, yeah.
Jayson Davies
So, yeah, okay, so sorry, really quickly. First was physical location. Second was social inclusion, and what was the third one?
Savitha Sundar
Then third is academic inclusion. So when you they must be able to access the same content that their peers access, right? So we don't even present like a kid who has extensive support needs often is learning the alphabet all the way up to high school, right? Because we don't. Know what they know, what they are capable of knowing, true, right? What if we provided these supports in the general education classroom? What if we put our effort in making that like OTs, the time we spend in what we currently do? Don't take away any time. Don't expect adding more work to yourself. But just think about the same time if it was used in making the general education experience accessible, just recess, just cafeteria as an OT team. Can you all sit together and brainstorm? How can we make cafeteria accessible for all our kiddos in our district? How is it going in your school? How is it going in my schools? Can we all implement the every moment counts comfortable cafeteria program. So another finding of my research was when people knew the how. They always had a clearer why. Why occasion when people knew their how, like people who were aware of these programs, you know, like a comfortable cafeteria program, or the you know, like the interoception program, or people who knew these had these tools, felt like they wanted to justify inclusion because they could do something about it using these programs. So I think having the tools to do it is so important for us to actually assume that role in schools. It's just that we don't know how to do it. That's the biggest problem.
Jayson Davies
All right. And that wraps up part one of our conversation with Dr Savitha Sundar. I hope this episode sparked some new insights for you and maybe some new thoughts about your students, your role, and maybe even the system around you, as I mentioned before. And part two, we'll move more into the practical strategies and what it can actually look like to support students with extensive support needs through inclusion focused ot services. We'll also talk about goals and how to promote participation and even collaborate with General Education staff in meaningful ways. So if you enjoyed this episode, or even if it was almost a little hard for you to listen to, because, you know, these conversations are so difficult and they must be had, even if they're not easy, then I want you to be sure to subscribe to this episode or subscribe to OT school health podcast, so you get notified as soon as episode 177 comes out, because in that episode, we're going to talk about more of the how to move forward stuff. So with that, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, and if you're listening on Apple podcast or on Spotify, please leave your thoughts in a comment. We would love to connect with you and learn more about how this podcast is supporting you now, and also how we can support you in the future. Be sure to also head on over to OT schoolhouse.com for more information about how you can support your students with our weekly newsletter at ot school house.com/join I hope to see you over there on the website, as well as in Episode 177 of the OT school house podcast. Take care.
Amazing Narrator
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