Rock Hill principal honored for celebrating special needs students

John Kirell believes every student needs a school where he or she belongs. So he wondered why some Rock Hill special needs students had to move from school to school every couple of years.

The answer led Kirell, principal at Rock Hill’s Belleview Elementary, to advocate for several self-contained classes of special needs children to be moved to his school.

Kirell said it also spawned a huge learning experience for the staff of his school, now home to nearly 50 special needs children in four self-contained classrooms. A fifth special needs classroom is to be added in the fall, he said.

Kirell was recently honored as 2016 Principal of the Year by the S.C. Council for Exceptional Children for his support of students with special needs. They include children on the autism spectrum and those with Down syndrome and other disabilities.

Kirell said he shares the award with a lot of other people, including Belleview teachers who adapted to accommodate special needs children and staff members who provided training.

He said it was not without many challenges.

“We had a very, very hard first year,” he said.

Kirell said he and most of his teaching staff didn’t have the knowledge or experience to know how to deal with special needs children. The transition involved a lot of training, he said.

“When you are trying to figure out what to do for a little guy who is clearly in crisis,” he said, “and you don’t know what to do, people were asking, ‘Do you regret making this decision?’ ”

Kirell said he does not. “Even then, I knew it was the right thing to do.”

Danni Fuller, the mother of a 7-year-old autistic student at Belleview, said Kirell made a difference, “elevating the importance of these kids, educating his staff and making a culture where the kids can be celebrated instead of feeling like they are a burden.”

Kirell said it started when two self-contained classrooms for special needs children were moved from another school to Belleview in the 2014-15 academic year.

One was a kindergarten to second-grade class for children with mild disabilites who could work toward moving into general education classes, he said.

The second group was a kindergarten to first-grade class for students with more profound disabilities, most of whom probably would not be on track to earn a high school diploma, he said.

Kirell said he asked where the students would go when they aged out of the Belleview classes. He was told they would move to another school for second and third grades, and they would move yet again for fourth and fifth grades.

Kirell said it didn’t seem right that the students had to move so often.

“We are asking this group of learners who have a very difficult time transitioning to transition to three schools before they leave elementary school,” he said. “We don’t ask that of their typical peers; we ask them to transition three times in 12 years.”

Kirell said Belleview, with a current enrollment of 485 and a capacity for around 600, had extra room, and he suggested basing the program there. “We can build that program under this roof,” he said.

District leaders agreed.

This year, Kirell said, Belleview added a class for the more profoundly disabled special needs children in second, third and fourth grades. Next fall, he said, it will add a fourth- and fifth-grade classrom for that group of students.

Belleview also this year added a classroom for 4-year-old children with developmental delays who might go into one of the special needs classes when they move up to kindergarten, he said.

He said a long-term school base is important because it allows children to establish bonds and feel at home.

“Kids deserve to look back and say, ‘That’s where I went to school,’ ” Kirell said.

“They need to develop relationships with kids and adults that can help them along the way,” he said. “Somebody who can recognize that something is off. If you’re bouncing from place to place every couple years, it’s hard to build those relationships.”

Martha Compton, a special education teacher who nominated Kirell for the award, believes he has made the education of exceptional students a priority.

“I have found a faculty that has followed their leader’s example of acceptance of all students,” she wrote. “My students have been able to participate in inclusion opportunities that were not available at our previous school.”

Megan Diamond, a resource teacher who nominated Kirell, said he raised awareness and championed student acceptance in newsletters and special programs.

“He has created a positive climate in the building,” she wrote, “where everyone matters.”

Kirell said the whole school needed professional development for the change, because some of the special needs children spend part of the day in general education classes.

“What has been the most fun is to watch how our general ed students have received and worked with their peers who are coming in from the self-contained classrooms,” he said. “It is great how quickly they accepted them and worked with them.”

Fuller said many parents of autistic children find themselves in conflict with schools, but that hasn’t been her experience.

“In the autism community, I hear parents constantly frustrated and concerned and unhappy, and that has never been our reality in two years at Belleview. Not one bit.”

Fuller said Kirell has gained a greater understanding of autistic children. Her son had troubles with aggression, and Kirell “made every single effort to understand why my son might have been being aggressive and combat those issues,” she said.

Tonia Delgado, who has two children with autism at Belleview, said her children are able to go into general classrooms “for a large portion of the day,” which she said doesn’t happen in all schools.

The staff is “so well trained and so ready to take on these children with special needs,” she said.

Kirell said the school has made many changes. It has a multi-sensory room where students, especially those on the autisic spectrum, can go to calm down.

And it’s had some success, he said.

Two students from the more severely disabled class have moved into the group for milder disabilities this year, Kirell said, and several students from that group have moved into general classrooms for all or most of the day.

“We are in a very different place than last year; we are better off,” he said. “We still have some things we need to do differently, but our challenges are positive challenges because a lot of our students are pushing more into the general ed curriculum.”

This story was originally published February 25, 2016 at 9:12 PM with the headline "Rock Hill principal honored for celebrating special needs students."