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Shenango gets the ball rolling on road to inclusivity

New Castle News - 2/9/2021

Feb. 9—Six Shenango High students have gotten the ball rolling.

Jim Janacone, though, did it first.

With help from school officials and Special Olympics, Janacone — the district's special services coordinator — spearheaded the creation of a varsity bocce team comprising both traditional and special needs students.

Officially, Special Olympics refers to the former as "partners," and the latter as "athletes," according to coach and life skills teacher Jeff Allay.

The players themselves, though, embrace a single label.

"It's not 'this person needs help, and I'm helping them,'" Allay said. "If you ask any of our kids, they're all teammates."

The bocce team is part of a life skills program begun during the 2019-20 school year aimed at fostering inclusion by allowing students who had been attending similar programs in other districts to remain at Shenango.

"Moving toward bocce was part of that idea," Janacone said, "to provide an opportunity for those students to be able to be more integrated into the district and really be more of a Wildcat."

Although it wasn't launched until the second year of the life skills program, bocce was envisioned from Day One.

The team is sponsored by Special Olympics and Interscholastic Unified Sports, which also funds everything from the coach's stipend to the balls, court and uniforms. It also is supported by the PIAA and the state Department of Education'sBureau of Special Education.

The umbrella organization limits the number of schools that can participate, Janacone said, and he noted that both the Wilmington and New Castle Area school districts had bocce teams before Shenango did.

"I called the coordinator for the state and I said that we would really like to have this opportunity for our district," Janacone said. "The first year that we started the life skills classroom, the gentleman and I mutually agreed to hold off until this school year to do it. But he honored Shenango as the top spot, in that I had reached out first."

Teams must field a proportional number of students with and without intellectual disabilities, with one team consisting of six to eight athletes. Teams are required to hold at least three regular season matches, after which they advance to regional competition. Winners there move on to the IUS Bocce Championship in Hershey in March.

"They're super excited," Allay said of his players, who have won their first two matches. "Their goal is to win states. Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to be able to do that this year due to COVID. But even the seniors are talking about, 'Hey, we're going to build a good program for the future.' "

COVID also put a damper on crowd size for the team's lone home match on Jan. 30. Yet it also pointed to the expanding atmosphere of inclusivity that the life skills program appears to be fueling.

"Typically, that would have been a packed house, but COVID kind of threw a wrench in that," Janacone said. "The good thing was that our basketball team had an away game that same evening, so each of the basketball players came early to the bocce meet and cheered on their peers before they got on the bus."

In addition to bocce, the district's life skills program has spawned a Students Helping Students club that also is taking inclusivity to the next level.

""It's kind of interesting," Allay said, "with that model of inclusion — seeing teammates, not people that they're helping — they actually want some of the kids they're helping to be a part of the club, like be a co-president or vice president or things like that.

"The really cool thing is, I think we have about 20 kids that are involved in the club, and out of those 20 kids, we've had several kids say, 'I know exactly what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be involved in special ed somehow.'"

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