I really want people to know that just because our school has a lot of kids with behavior problems doesn’t mean it’s a bad school,” a fifth-grader whom I’ll call Carl told me. “If you’re as smart as me,” he continued, “you’ll realize that if it’s a behavior school then it’s actually a great school. Because not a lot of schools can handle kids with behavior problems.”

Carl attends Sharp-Leadenhall Elementary School, a specialized school for students with severe emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD) in the Baltimore City School District. Sharp-Leadenhall has the capacity to serve 50 students (current enrollment is 32) with 25 instructional staff.

Sharp-Leadenhall’s principal, Dr. Lillian Cockrell, emailed me after reading an article I published arguing that the pressure to keep students with emotional and behavioral disabilities in traditional schools can do more harm than good, and invited me to visit her school “to see how a good EBD program is organized.”

“Special education departments today are all about ‘full inclusion,’” she explained. “And I get that, up to a point. But the other side of saying, ‘We’re doing full inclusion’ is, ‘We don’t have special programs for special education students who need them.’”

“We provide students what they need therapeutically,” explained Cockrell, who began her career as a psychotherapist. Her philosophy is that staff must never be reactive; reacting to students’ behavior puts them in charge. By presenting a calm face and using consistent language in response to behaviors, staffers give students a greater sense of order, and they can think better beyond immediate crises to broader patterns in a student’s behavior.

Read the full article about full inclusion schools by Max Eden at The 74.