There is important work being done on Melonie Cox’s classroom floor.
Wooden blocks are being engineered into parking lots and wobbling towers. A wooden fire truck is racing along the carpet to an urgent “woooo, woooo.” These prekindergartners are too busy at play to care that one of them doesn’t speak as well as the others or that another among them has Down Syndrome. That’s part of the point of the LAUNCH program.
The Learning Activities Uniting Children (LAUNCH) program at Castleman Creek Elementary School mixes the prekindergarten children of Midway school district employees with prekindergarten students with special needs, such as autism or language difficulties.
The special-needs students spend a half day in their Preschool Program for Children with Disabilities class and a half day in their LAUNCH class with the employee children, which teachers refer to as their “typical peers.”
“Research has shown that children with special needs do not gain knowledge as quickly in self-contained classes as they do when they are with their peers,” said Cox, who teaches the LAUNCH program at Castleman Creek.
Cox said the program harnesses peer modeling to help the special-needs students with their behavioral, social and educational development. If their friends get praised for sitting nicely on the carpet for story time, then they want to do it also. The ultimate goal is to get the students ready to enter the mainstream student population for kindergarten.
Shelby, a 3-year-old with Down Syndrome who is in the Preschool Program for Students with Disabilities, is one year too young to be an official member of the LAUNCH program. But she often crosses into the adjoining class to play and spend time with both the other special-needs students and the “typical peers.”
“She loves it. She cries when she thinks she’s not getting to go,” her mom, Keri Tindell, said. “She thinks she’s a big girl.”
Tindell said Shelby’s language is really coming along and that she responds well to the structure of her class. Tindell also likes that Shelby is getting a taste of being part of the mainstream school population, which is what Tindell hopes Shelby will be part of in a couple of years.
“The one thing we’ve always said about Shelby is that we never, ever want Shelby to feel like she’s different,” Tindell said.
The fact that the children in LAUNCH are learning to be accepting and loving at an early age means a lot to Tindell.
“These will hopefully be her friends for years to come,” she said.
The employees’ children started school a week early, and the teachers used that week to prep them for their classmates. They talked about how everyone is different and some of their friends might not know how to color or might not talk the same as them.
“We talk about how we’re going to be role models. To the employees’ kids, it’s exciting,” Cox said.
“They’re loving being helpers,” Jones added. “They see us loving on them and helping them and then they start mimicking what we’re doing.”
Cox and Lauren Jones, teacher of the Preschool Program for Children with Disabilities, said the special-needs students also learn in their LAUNCH class to become comfortable with being part of the group and being around their “typical peers” who can sometimes be louder and more socially aggressive.