WoodsEdge Learning Center, a part of the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency, is a year-round special education school for students ages 5 to 18 who are moderately to severely cognitively impaired, and for those with autism spectrum disorder. The Intensive Learning Center is the school for youth held at the Kalamazoo County Juvenile Home. Heather Bigelow is the adaptive art specialist who brings these students together in a unique collaboration.
“Sometimes I call it ‘extreme arting’,” Bigelow says. “I have 172 students. WoodsEdge Learning Center is a school for children with various disabilities, and so my job is to basically figure out how I can serve each child individually the best that I can. I work on things like communication, teach them to touch things like finger painting and glue, the proper use of materials—like we don’t eat glue, we don’t eat paper and crayons—and following direction, those types of things.”
In 2017, Bigelow and a teacher at the Intensive Learning Center came up with the idea of bringing both groups of students together.
“The ILC students are not in their home high schools anymore,” Bigelow says. “They are put into ILC to finish their high school graduation process. I started thinking that it would be amazing if those kids could come over to WoodsEdge, and we could do a type of peer-to-peer situation. I believe when you are trying to rehabilitate somebody that counseling and therapy are super important, but I also think when you are helping somebody else, that is healing.”
Bigelow’s theory proved correct. The program has been an astounding success—for both sets of students.
“If you are helping somebody else who is physically not as capable as you are, or cognitively not as capable as you are, or even emotionally impaired, that really helps heal whatever you have going on,” she says. “Any tragedies or traumas you have had in your life as a younger person. As (the program) grew, it blossomed into having them come a couple times a week.”
To earn that privilege, something the ILC students soon grew to see as a reward, they must have good grades in their own schoolwork. If some students resisted at first, not sure if they could handle the challenge of working with someone different, Bigelow saw that resistance quickly fade, to be replaced by a sense of accomplishment for both students. She says some have been hired later to work at WoodsEdge, while others decided to continue their education at a college level to work in similar careers.
To learn more about KRESA special education, visit www.kresa.org .
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