The fluorescent lights in Room 110 at Brother Rice Catholic High School in Chicago are dimmed by fabric imprinted with images of the sky. The white-and-blue design softens the light, making it more comfortable for the students who study there. Chairs have elastic bands stretched across their front legs so students can push against them to relieve tension.
The room is home to Mount Sion, the all-boys-school’s special education inclusion program, which is entering its third year this fall. Brother Rice is among a small but growing number of Catholic schools across the country working to serve students with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
A 2026 survey by the National Catholic Partnership on Disability found that roughly 18 percent of the school principals said that their school has served at least one student with an intellectual disability. Disability advocates, however, point out that the figure may not capture the national reality, since only 224 institutions responded to the survey, far short of the approximately 5,800 Catholic schools in the United States. Data like this can be hard to interpret in part because schools define the work differently.
“Sometimes schools are serving many students [with learning disabilities] but they haven’t named it, they haven’t labeled it,” according to Laura MacDonald, vice president of content and program development at the National Catholic Educational Association. “Schools just do it. Many of us believe that whoever comes into your school, you’re there to serve them.”
In 2014, 3.5 percent of students in N.C.E.A. schools were reported as having been diagnosed with a disability. Today that figure is 9.8 percent. Ms. MacDonald said N.C.E.A. has established a task force that is developing a directory of schools with promising programs.
Some schools lean toward a more segregated model, in which special needs students remain mostly in their own classrooms, while others adopt a more integrated approach. Then there are the rare U.S. Catholic schools that serve only students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The students’ abilities span a wide spectrum.
“We see good things happening in pockets,” according to Michael Boyle, executive director of the Herrmann Center for Innovative Catholic Education at St. Louis University. “And I think that’s part of the problem. As a universal church, we should be seeing something much more comprehensive and extensive.”
Still, a number of schools and dioceses are making an effort, Mr. Boyle said, noting the autism program at the St. Nicholas of Tolentine elementary school in Chicago as well as efforts in Arlington, Va., Milwaukee and Miami. N.C.E.A. is partnering with Getting Real Access to Catholic Education, which promotes inclusion at Catholic schools, and St. Louis University hosted what it called the first-ever national convening on disability and Catholic education in May 2025.
Nevertheless, most families who search for a Catholic education for a child with a disability will have a hard time finding it. And when a Catholic school rejects a student’s application, Mr. Boyle said, the family may also feel rejected by their faith community.
“As Catholic educators, as all Catholics, we are charged to reach to the margins and serve those that are marginalized,” he said. “We sometimes have forgotten that. We need to think about who we are as Catholic educators.”
At Brother Rice, the rediscovery began after one family spoke up and stood its ground.
‘The Essence of Who We Are’
On Chicago’s South Side, Catholics tend to identify themselves by their home parish. For the Baudo family, that parish is St. Barnabas. Carrie and Rich Baudo’s firstborn son, Nolan, attended the parish school. Nolan’s younger brother Parker did as well, though this was a little more complicated.
Parker has Down syndrome. After he attended a supportive preschool, the family wanted him to go to St. Barnabas, where not only his brother but also his cousins, his friends and most of the other kids in the neighborhood went. Everyone, from the principal to the pastor, pitched in to make it happen.
“We kind of co-created a program leveraging as many resources as we could to give him a real community experience,” Mr. Baudo said. “We were building the plane while flying it.”
He added, “the kids embraced him from the outset. And that’s where we really saw his impact on them as much as they impacted him.”
As Parker grew up, the family started looking for Catholic high school options. The only school that could accommodate their son’s needs was Notre Dame High School in Niles, a 90-minute drive north. The public schools in their area also fell short, as they segregated the special needs students from the general student population, and Parker was not used to that.
The Baudos got a few flyers from Brother Rice in the mail, but as far as they could determine, it would not be an option for Parker. They asked to be removed from the mailing list. They didn’t want to get Parker’s hopes up. Nevertheless, a week or so later, Parker found a flyer from Brother Rice addressed to him in the mailbox.
“I got upset and wrote an email,” Rich said. “I just said, ‘I get that you guys can’t accommodate him, but take him off the list, because I can’t have his name on a Brother Rice [flyer] and then have him start asking questions I can’t answer.’”
After the flyer mishap, Greg Nye, the director of admissions, and Matt Prunckle, dean of student life, invited the family to talk. Administrators had been considering starting a program to accommodate students with special needs, they said, but it wasn’t fully formed.
“We spent the last nine years pushing the boulder up the hill,” Mr. Baudo recalls telling the school. “We can’t do that for high school. There has to be more structure, a more established program—because those high school years are so critical.” The school agreed.
Five months later, the school’s board approved the Mount Sion program.
“Any inclusive school that’s opted in [to serving students with special needs] will always say it’s the best thing they’ve done,” Mr. Prunckle said. “It’s much more about what opening your doors does to the school than what we do for those few more students. Can we be a Catholic school without being inclusive? It should be the essence of who we are.”
Inclusive and Integrated
After the morning bell, Ginny Morrissey of the admissions office waited for stragglers arriving at St. Madeline Sophie in Bellevue, Wash. “It’s usually the same kids,” she told me when I visited last May.
As the students came in, Ms. Morrissey filled out their tardy slips without even asking their names. She knows just about all of the 150 students, she said. After a wave of students arrived, she asked one, “Where’s your other brother?” The student pointed to him in front of the counter, just out of Ms. Morrissey’s line of sight. She smiled.
St. Madeline Sophie first opened its doors to students on Sept. 6, 2005. Ever since that day, children with special needs have been welcomed into their integrated classrooms. It is a tradition that Jessica Patterson, the school’s principal, embraced when she arrived at the school as an inclusion specialist 15 years ago.
“When it comes to the idea of inclusion, it can’t live siloed in one place,” Ms. Patterson said. “It can definitely be inspired in one place by a single person, but if it’s going to live on and sustain itself, it has to really live everywhere.”
In a way, that mindset informs how families are chosen for the school. Like other parochial schools, St. Madeline prioritizes parish families, and they try to accept as many children from each family as they can. But Ms. Patterson interviews each family to assess whether parents will be good partners in education, and how the family will fit with the school’s culture.
That cultural fit is much more important than the ability to pay full tuition or become a donor, she said. The culture they have works because the parents not only support the teachers and students but also support one another.
“Everybody says they’re for inclusion when it’s very convenient, but are you going to say you’re for inclusion when it’s inconvenient for you or your child?” Ms. Patterson said.
Two of Ms. Patterson’s sons are at the school. Before coming to St. Madeline Sophie, she spent time teaching on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona. Before college, she was in foster care, and she said her teachers helped her through difficult moments. It inspired her to pursue her career in education.
“I didn’t have much, and I’m never going to be able to just go work at a typical school, doing a typical job, with kids that are just typical,” she said. “I need to be fighting for something, for someone.”
Ms. Patterson took me on a tour of the school, including a number of modular buildings that were meant to be temporary. Some of the students sat next to their aides, and in one classroom one of the students was pacing while the teacher lectured. The school does not have a gym, and services related to special needs—like occupational, physical and feeding therapy—come through third-party providers.
About 70 percent of St. Madeline Sophie students are neurotypical, according to Nicole Miller, the lead specialist at the school. All students in each grade share a common homeroom, and those with special needs are integrated as much as possible, according to Ms. Miller, who has been at the school for 11 years and brings expertise in both elementary and special education.
“Every kid has a seat in the classroom, a job in the classroom. You are 100 percent in this class,” she said.
“It’s not just beneficial for the students that are being included,” Ms. Miller said of this approach. “It’s beneficial for the students who are learning how to be kind and patient and see different types of people and different ways brains work.”
“But if and when kids need to go to other places for their learning, then they go and do that,” she added. Some children go to a different grade level for certain subjects, or go to an adaptive programming classroom. That includes students who need help with speech, but also those who are gifted and working on, for example, accelerated mathematics.
On the morning of May 20, families gathered for the final all-school Mass of the year. Afterward, they applauded the teachers as Ms. Patterson read words of praise she had collected about each educator. Before heading to work, parents took photos with their children.
Mary Nockles, an immigrant from the United Kingdom, has three children at the school. She often logs parent service hours while monitoring the students at recess. “I like to call it spying, because I am kind of spying on my kids and seeing what they’re doing, seeing how they’re socially interacting,” she said. Her eldest daughter, Matilda, has autism and Ms. Nockles said that, at times, her daughter can be “somewhat off in her own world.”
On one of her spying days, Ms. Nockles noticed that a student with Down syndrome was upset. “All my friends are going to leave and I’m not going to have any friends next year,” he told his aide, referring to classmates who were graduating out of the school. One of those classmates overheard the boy and went to gather others.
“And he brought them over to say, ‘We love you, we’re always going to be friends,’” Ms. Nockles said, emotionally. “These are 12- and 13-year-old kids just doing it of their own accord. And I just stood there watching it from afar, just going, ‘This is an amazing school.’ Because that happens all the time and it can go unnoticed.”
Ms. Nockles’ husband, Dan, says Matilda is “the best thing that ever happened” to him and inspired Mary and Dan to look for the best possible place for all their children. The best school, in this case, requires a 45-minute commute.
“Knowing that they’re not going to thrive in any soil, you find the right soil,” she said. “I feel like every kid should have a St. Madeline Sophie.”
But most children with special needs don’t, according to Elizabeth Potts, associate director of diocesan relations with the National Catholic Partnership on Disability. Effective ministry for those who have a disability is rare at parishes, she said, but the outreach is even more rare at schools.
“Some of these parents who were turned away decades ago, you still hear that wound when they talk about it. It is deep,” Ms. Potts said. “And there are people for whom it dramatically changes their relationship with the church. People leave the church because of it.”
In her work surveying Catholic schools across the country, she noted that many dioceses offer professional development related to learners with disabilities. But for more than half of the dioceses who responded to their study, the training was optional.
“Our Catholic teaching, and comments from the bishops, all emphasize that access to Catholic education is vital,” she said. “There are no asterisks on those comments that say, ‘except for learners with disabilities.’”
‘Reverse Inclusion’
In Dallas, Notre Dame School serves only students with developmental disabilities, from ages 6 to 22. Students come to the school, which is built in the heart of the city and shares grounds with St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church, from 87 zip codes. The School Sisters of Notre Dame established the school to provide a specialized environment to educate students with intellectual disabilities in 1963, before any law required schools to care for this population. They began with 19 students, and today the enrollment is about 150.
The sisters have a history of inclusion. “The School Sisters were educating Black students during segregation,” according to Carmen Fernández, the school’s principal. “They had crosses burning in front of their convent. It wasn’t about ‘Can you afford this?’ or ‘Are you Catholic?’ Those were not questions they were asked, and we don’t ask them either. We’re here to serve a person’s educational needs.”
Ms. Fernández has been at Notre Dame for 37 years. Both her mother and her aunt were a part of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, and she would babysit a younger cousin with severe disabilities growing up. She has lived this charism her whole life.
What happens at Notre Dame is “reverse inclusion,” Ms. Fernández said, explaining that they welcome community members and students from other schools as visitors to their school. She walked me down the hallways and into classrooms. She knew all the students, and stopped to challenge some of them on goals they had been working on.
In the cafeteria, as students socialized with their peers, some were accompanied by aides. Lunch is also part of their education, Ms. Fernández said, whether it means using napkins, heating food with microwaves, clearing trays, or using utensils and chewing properly. Students don’t always get this kind of attention at other schools, she said, including those that have inclusive programs.
“We had a young man who would never eat his lunch. He just sat there like this,” Ms. Fernández said, staring blankly forward. She later discovered the young man had been traumatized at another school whose inclusion time happened during the lunch period. Some of the other students would take his food, “so it took a while to get to the point where he’d eat his lunch here.”
Notre Dame has washers and dryers, a closet with hangers, and a Murphy bed so students can practice practical skills and become as independent as possible. The school also has partnerships with 37 businesses in the Dallas community, where older students gain job experience.
“They’re the most vulnerable in society, so the more they do for themselves, the safer they are,” Ms. Fernández said. “It’s a very important part of our mission.”
Students also fully participate in the weekly celebration of Mass, including serving as altar servers. There is a teacher queuing them to bring up the gifts and going through the 27 steps of being an altar server. (Ms. Fernández, drawing on her experience as a vocational and music teacher, broke down the tasks and wrote a list.) The school also offers sacramental preparation, an area where Ms. Fernández said parishes often fail children with disabilities.
The recognition of the dignity of each student, she said, changes how they do the work. Witnessing that work made a profound impression on Kelly Kile.
Ms. Kile has twins. Her daughter, Grace, has Down syndrome. Her son, Tad, does not. Grace went to public school for the first 13 years of her life, and her family supported the inclusive approach. Then, around fourth or fifth grade, Ms. Kile started to see the gap between Grace and her classmates widen.
“It was a small neighborhood school and everybody knew everybody,” she said, noting that Grace was always invited to birthday parties and playdates at people’s houses. At one of those gatherings, something became clear.
“I watched as all the little girls were sitting in a circle on the floor, giggling and having fun,” she said. “And I watched Grace, and I can still see it to this day. Her head bounced from one side to the other trying to keep up with the conversation. It was evident she was lost, she couldn’t keep up anymore. And I watched as she slowly dropped her head and kind of scooted back out of the circle.”
As Ms. Kile put it: “My daughter is like these girls, but she’s also not like these girls.”
As she grew, finding a classroom that was a good fit remained challenging. In seventh grade, Grace was in a self-contained room with four other students, two of whom did not speak.
“My daughter Grace, [on the other hand], could talk the side off a barn door,” Ms. Kile said. When her teachers were busy, Grace would sneak upstairs to sit in with her twin brother’s class instead.
“She wanted to be a part of a community,” Ms. Kile said. “That wasn’t her community.”
That experience points to a broader tension. Teachers in a typical classroom are often not trained to help students with Down syndrome or autism. It can be disruptive. Yet a fully separate classroom can leave a student isolated, never fully integrated into the school community.
It’s different at Notre Dame, she said. It was the only place Grace has found a community. Ms. Kile, a member of the Church of Christ, has a master’s degree in special education and taught at small private schools for children with learning disabilities. A few years after Grace made the move to Notre Dame, she did too.
“I think we’re held to a higher standard because of the cross on our wall, because of who we are answering to,” according to Ms. Kile.
Still, like the other schools, Notre Dame has its limitations. The school cannot accommodate students who exhibit extreme aggression, nor those who are prone to leaving a classroom or building without supervision.
“We can’t really serve students with complex medical needs because we don’t have a nurse,” Ms. Kile said. “There are still a lot of kiddos in the world whose needs go unmet. And that’s really rotten.”
Some students may not get into a Catholic school because they have needs that exceed the school’s capacity, but most will not get in because a nearby school simply does not serve the special needs population at all.
Colleen McCoy-Cejka, owner and managing partner of Inclusion Solutions and co-founder of the Matthew 19:14 Project, described the Notre Dame model as unique but not easy to replicate.
“Separating kids with disabilities from their neurotypical peers is actually not beneficial—to them or to their neurodivergent peers,” Ms. McCoy-Cejka said, citing research that supports a more integrated approach. “The more we can educate kids in a neurodiverse community, [the more] everybody actually benefits.”
Ms. McCoy-Cejka’s first child, Quinn, was diagnosed with a nonverbal learning disability when he was 3. When he was around 9, he received his autism diagnosis.
“The biggest [challenge] is having schools reach out and say, ‘Hey, we’d like to do this. Will somebody help us?’ Because most schools won’t do that,” she said. “The first thing we always tell them is: You already have students on your campus who have special needs. Start by identifying who they are and thinking about how to meet their needs intentionally.”
Over the last 10 years, Ms. McCoy-Cejka has seen progress, though she described it as “really slow and sporadic and not systemwide.” Often, a school that offers inclusive education ends up with a disproportionate number of students with disabilities because other schools will not accept them.
“It’s not the wealthy schools that are doing it best. It is not about financial wealth,” Ms. McCoy-Cejka said. She said some of the most under-resourced schools are the ones that are excelling.
School leaders are afraid, she said, because they are not trained to serve students with special needs. But schools like Brother Rice demonstrate that educators can in fact learn how to serve students with disabilities and can find the resources they need.
‘Telling the Whole Story’
On the morning of May 6, Mount Sion students and their peer mentors participated in what may be best described as an icebreaker. The students all had the names of characters written on sticky notes stuck on their backs. Each character had a partner character: Buzz and Woody from “Toy Story,” for example, or Han Solo and Chewbacca from “Star Wars.” A couple of the students had peanut butter and jelly written on their sticky notes.
Students had to ask each other questions to guess their characters, an exercise that may seem simple enough for neurotypical students. But it teaches the Mount Sion kids both social skills and deductive reasoning.
The students did not always figure out their character, though, including with the peer mentors. One young man, a senior, could not figure out the name on his sticky note: “What’s the name of Shaggy’s sidekick? What is Shaggy’s dog’s name?” He had never watched “Scooby-Doo.”
Mary Erdmann, the director of Mount Sion, kept a close eye out and was quick to assist. Ms. Erdmann built and now runs the day-to-day program. Education was a career change for her after spending decades in finance.
“The limitations we have are the reasons people say, ‘We can’t do this.’ But those limitations become our strongest assets,” she said.
Administrators have implemented the program in stages, adding a new freshman class of about four students each year. This year’s incoming juniors have been at the school since Mount Sion began. The school is adding a second special education teacher this year, and administrators also rely on one-on-one peer mentors during each period, drawn from the student population.
They also rely on outside help from St. Xavier University, also in Chicago, which sends four clinicians and a supervisor to the school on Wednesdays to work on speech. Lewis University, in the suburb of Romeoville, provides a dual-credit course for its students, called “The Exceptional Learner” class, and sends student teachers to Brother Rice.
Brendan Donohue, a Mount Sion student, sat next to his peer mentor, Timothy Reidy. Mr. Donohue gave short answers to my questions. He started at Brother Rice with Parker Baudo. He said he preferred the school to his previous one because it was all boys. And he likes having mentors. He had a very hard time last year saying goodbye to the graduating seniors.
Students can only be mentors during their free periods, Mr. Reidy explained. Technically, this was his study hall period. As I spoke with Mr. Reidy, Mr. Donohue began to sing to himself. “I have about five songs in my head right now. Actually seven,” Mr. Donohue said. “Do you know the song, ‘I get knocked down, but I get up again, you ain’t never going to get me down’?”
Part of the Mount Sion program includes giving students free time. During one of the periods, peer mentors facilitated a game of hacky sack. Meanwhile, one student watched videos of trains on YouTube. Another student did some work on an animated YouTube show, though he was protective of the details since, as he explained, the characters are not yet copyrighted. In the afternoon, students took turns placing decorations into their new aquarium, home of a fish named Thor.
At the end of the day, the students filed out the door. From the hallway, Parker looked back at Ms. Erdmann and wagged his eyebrows. She looked back at him sternly.
“Parker, we’ve talked about this,” she said after she called him back into the classroom. He probably learned the flirtatious gesture from another student who thought it was funny.
Jennifer Buss, a professor of elementary and special education at Lewis University, worked with administrators at Brother Rice to help form their programs. She had already worked with Parker at St. Barnabas, and has helped schools in the Chicagoland area start programs.
“By telling the whole story—the good, the bad and the ugly—we make it sustainable,” she said of establishing a program for students with special needs. “If we shove the hard parts under the rug, that’s not the full picture.”
Last year, she said, one of the peer mentors approached one of the Mount Sion students who is a gifted artist. “I don’t know how to draw,” the mentor confessed. “Will you teach me?”
“And [the student] literally became the teacher,” Ms. Buss said. “That relationship was just beautiful. I don’t know how many times I had to leave the room [because I was becoming emotional]. I was like, ‘I can’t.’ That natural relationship building, it just blows me away.”
It’s personal for Ms. Buss. She has a specific learning disability in reading and math that was severe enough that she was removed from her Catholic school in second grade.
“They just told my parents, ‘We can’t work with her. She needs to go to public school. We don’t know what to do,” she said.
“If you were to ask me when I was in second grade, sure, I was mad. And so it’s just wild that here I was a kid that was excluded and now—God has a plan—I’m providing opportunities not only here but in other schools.”
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Reporting for this article was funded in part by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
This article appears in September 2026.
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