Down the hall, Adrian Bland tells me about her experience in the hospitality suite, which partners with Embassy Suites to train kids in a range of positions, from housekeeping to food prep. Bland works as a porter, what she later described as her dream job. “I like that I get to talk to people,” responded Bland, 18, when I asked her the best thing about the job, which she elected after trying out a number of positions, including as the door person, laundry attendant, and dishwasher. The fact that she, unlike at the other hotel jobs, gets tips also helps; her biggest single tip amounted to $20, she adds, beaming. As of early June, Bland is one of the few River Terrace students to have secured a job: She’s been hired by Embassy Suites’s Chevy Chase Hotel.

During my visit to River Terrace, Napper and Bland—both of whom are graduating this year—are visibly proud. And they clearly feel at home. When students start to trickle out into the hallways at the end of the school day, chatter reverberates throughout the glass hallways, and the campus looks just like any other high school.

“In all the classrooms, there’s a strong sense of community among the students; they applaud each other a lot. When kids come up [to the board] and touch the right answer, everybody applauds,” Custer said. “To see [students] rally around one another and look out for one another and recognize one another’s ability—I don’t think that’s going to happen in a general-education school,” Custer said, “because here, nobody’s worried about being cool.”

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Although inclusion looks great on paper, such programs seldom succeed in lifting disabled students’ opportunities, and that’s probably why teachers such as Custer and Jamin Hollingsworth, the hospitality teacher, champion places like River Terrace. For many educators, the employment outcomes generated by these specialized programs are more important than the fact that students are segregated from the mainstream population.

But that doesn’t give school districts license to prioritize workforce programs that separate special-needs students from their peers over others that promote inclusion, argued Vanderbilt’s Carter, who worked as a transition specialist before getting his doctorate. The conversation, he said, should instead be on how to improve inclusive programs so that special-needs students get the support they need.

“My experience generally is that segregated experiences tend to lead to segregated experiences,” Carter said. Students may get job training—but for jobs that are filled almost exclusively by people with disabilities. “If we can show that whatever experiences we’re doing actually lead students to attain the kinds of jobs they want and not the kind of jobs we think they ought to fit into then I get much less worried about what the path was,” Carter added. “The problem is that most of the things we do under the auspices of being vocational training [don’t] actually lead to integrated community jobs.”

Integrated workforce programs can also help motivate special-needs youth, Carter said, giving them the opportunity to hear about their peers’ college and career goals. Then there’s the more abstract benefit of showing mainstream children and teachers that special-needs students—even those with more severe developmental disabilities such as Down syndrome—have workforce potential. What’s at risk of being lost when special-needs students enroll in specialized programs such as River Terrace are “the opportunities for others in the community to come and see people with severe disabilities as having gifts and strengths and to see them in a different light,” said Carter, who isn’t familiar with the River Terrace program specifically but has researched its general model extensively.