Maple Heights High School became a Special Olympics Unified Champion School with a basketball team made up of eight athletes, eight partners, and two student coaches. The athletes are students with disabilities, and the partners are typical peers. The athletes and partners practice and play together, creating friendships on and off the court.
Maple Heights is the first district in the area to offer this inclusion-based sports program. While the district has offered Special Olympics programs in the past, this one specifically allows our students with disabilities to break away from that more isolated model and help foster peer friendships through peer models and help them build life skills. “What drives this program is the connection between our students and our typical peers in the building,” said Maple Heights Intervention Specialist Karen Welch.
Welch is serving as the head coach for the team. The team practices once a week, led by the student coaches. The two student coaches for basketball were David Collins and Ashton Pugh, who are seniors on the Maple Heights High School varsity basketball team.
The Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools program promotes social inclusion through intentionally planned and implemented activities affecting systems-wide change. In the two months since the program began, Welch is already seeing a difference in the school community. The team morale is outstanding, and the whole team is 100 percent “in it.”
The program is fostering a school climate where students with disabilities feel welcome and can feel a part of all activities. The inclusiveness of the team is sparking conversations off the court, in classrooms, hallways, and in the lunchroom that are new to Maple Heights. “I am starting to see the athletes and partners sitting together in the cafeteria,” said Welch. “My students are starting to branch out and feel comfortable enough to say hello to new people.”
For their first match on January 27, they traveled to Cuyahoga Falls High School to compete in their first tournament against neighboring Champion Schools to play Strongsville, Woodridge, and Cuyahoga Falls. Through outstanding teamwork, dedication, and support of each other on and off the court, Maple Heights returned home with wins in two of the three games.
The next Unified Champion sport offered at Maple Heights this spring will be track and field.