08/25/2026
We talk about inclusion a lot in education, but I think we sometimes make the conversation much more complicated than it needs to be.
A student can have the right placement, receive their accommodations, participate in grade-level instruction, and still spend the majority of their day feeling like they are on the outside of the classroom community. They can be physically present without having a real connection to the students around them. And when we think about inclusion only through the lens of placement and access, we can miss one of the most important parts of a student's school experience: whether they actually feel like they belong there.
Peer relationships matter for every student, but they can be especially meaningful for students with disabilities who may have difficulty navigating social cues, communication, self-regulation, or the unspoken rules of friendship that many other students seem to pick up naturally. The answer is not to assume those relationships will simply happen. Sometimes we have to create the conditions for them. That might mean explicitly teaching students how to enter a conversation, being more thoughtful about groupings, giving peers opportunities to support one another, or creating classroom routines where students actually get to know the people sitting beside them.
There is also an important distinction between peer support and peer dependence. I never want a student with a disability to become known as the student everyone helps. That can look inclusive on the surface while quietly communicating that the student is always the one receiving and everyone else is always the one giving. Real relationships are more reciprocal than that. Students should have opportunities to contribute their strengths, make decisions, help others, be funny, be challenged, make mistakes, and simply exist as a member of the group without their disability becoming the center of every interaction.
