"He taught me how to respect kids less fortunate."
Those words, spoken by an 11-year-old student at Carwise Middle School, prove the value of an experiment at the school that paired gifted children with mentally retarded children during the 2003-04 school year.
Called the Alliance, the program was the creation of two Carwise teachers: Linda Wallenhorst, who teaches gifted students, and Becky Gonzales, who teaches retarded students.
Did the two groups have anything to teach each other? Wallenhorst and Gonzales had wondered whether children who generally have IQs higher than 130 and children with IQs below 50 could work together. So when school started in the fall, they paired each gifted sixth-grader with a special needs student. Twice a week the entire year, the gifted students visited their partners in the special needs classroom to help them with academic and social skills.
Of course, this is not the first time that top public school students helped out with retarded students. What was unusual in this case was that the pairings between the students lasted all year, allowing true friendships to blossom and giving the gifted students a window to see into the lives of the retarded students.
As school ended this week, teachers, students and administrators at Carwise declared the Alliance a spectacular success. The advanced students enjoyed mentoring and teaching the retarded students and learned quickly the rewards of helping people less fortunate. Their work surely also gave them an appreciation for the special gifts and struggles of their mentally retarded classmates.
The retarded students showed substantial improvement in their communication and social skills during the year, a greater willingness to work when the gifted students visited them and got a kick out of having friends among the "cool" students in the school.
Both sides learned that two groups that seemed to have nothing in common in fact had some experiences they could share.
Much of the discrimination and harassment suffered by minority groups in America today grow out of the majority's refusal or lack of opportunity to connect with and understand those who are different. The Alliance program built a bridge between two groups that would have had no reason to relate otherwise, and in doing so, achieved its most important success.
