Inclusive Sports

Nora, Jana, and Layla bracing for the Cool School Plunge in March at South View Middle School.

I will never forget stepping into a breakout session at the Minnesota Middle School Association Annual Conference in 2013 and hearing about the Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools® (SOUCS) program for the first time.

Nick Cedergren from Special Olympics Minnesota (SOMN) and a team of Unified partners and athletes from another metro-area school were at the conference to share their experience. As soon as I saw their faces light up as they talked about their Unified experiences, I knew this needed to be our next step at the school where I worked, South View Middle School in Edina, Minnesota. We already had a small, homegrown experience at our school called “Peer Insights,” where students we had identified as kind-hearted, caring kids could spend part of their day with students in our DCD program. Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools® programming, however, provided a structure and created an opportunity for us to reform and level up this experience to transform our entire school culture. I was so excited to get started!

Our first step was to share this information with our teachers. With the support of our team at SOMN, we received a personal visit to our school to talk to us about what it would take to become a Unified Champion School. They listened to what we already had in place and talked with us about possible next steps and the support we would receive along the way to becoming a self-sustaining program. The biggest takeaway from the conversation was that it’s okay to start small and that we have a strong support system within our state Special Olympics team to help get us off the ground. Our student leaders were very excited, and it didn’t take long before our entire teacher team and school were ready to give it a try.

The strongest element of our SOUCS offering was our student leadership program. We had already established a strong foundation through our Peer Insights program, so our next step was to expand it through our school-wide advisory program. Our student leaders helped us to create Unified advisory experiences where our Unified partners and athletes started each day. This team of students helped us to plan and develop the vision for what SOUCS was going to be at our school. They worked together to plan and roll out our first school-wide campaign, “Spread the word to end the “R” word.” Beyond this, a huge goal for our leadership team was for our Unified friendships to extend beyond the school day to become authentic friendships where they would connect and hang out evenings and weekends, supporting each other and growing together. Time, attention, and support for this goal were provided by our teachers and families at home, which brought incredible strength to our Unified team as a whole. This was truly the beginning of our Unified family at South View.

The next element of SOUCS we focused on was related to sports. At the middle school level, this looks very different from how it tends to look in high school, so we had to figure out exactly what that would mean for us. Initially, we participated in state-wide SOMN opportunities. Our Unified partners and athletes prepared and took part in the Unified Bowling Invitational in the first year, and we later added Unified basketball, as well as track & field. Unified bowling was a great start for us and helped us to realize what was possible. The experience we had with invitationals led to the full-scale implementation of our Unified Physical Education (PE) class. Eventually, this class, paired with our focus on Unified student leadership, helped us to begin a partnership with our feeder elementary schools, where we welcomed young athletes to participate in PE games and a Unified track & field meet that we hosted at our school. In addition to greater involvement in statewide SOMN events, we continue to reimagine and grow our Unified PE experience and look forward to the next iteration.

The most exciting part of our year is hosting our Cool School Polar Plunge! The excitement builds over a few months, but the week of our event, you can feel the energy and passion for inclusion throughout our entire building. We have a spirit week, complete with dress-up days and a school-wide rally on the day of our Polar Plunge. Our Unified student leaders work together to select dress-up day themes and plan our rally, complete with games and speeches delivered together by our Unified partners and athletes. Following that, it’s PLUNGE time! We livestream the event so everyone who cannot attend live and in person can watch. For those who are not actively plunging, they are either in the stands cheering those who are or participating in Unified activities to lift the spirit of inclusion school-wide. It is electric and fun for our whole school.

Ultimately, our school culture and community are infinitely better because we are a Unified Champion School. Pure joy and friendship are celebrated each and every day, and the spirit of lifting each other up is at the heart of everything we do. We are grateful for the support, guidance, and partnership we have with Special Olympics, and we look forward to a future filled with inclusion and belonging for each and every student who walks through the doors of our school!