How a Utah school district is bringing its community together for special needs students, families

NORTH OGDEN — A fourth-grade student with Down syndrome at North Ogden Elementary School is showcasing how teams working together for inclusion can be successful in Utah.

After years of his mother advocating for him to get into his boundary school, 10-year-old Jude Garrett is finishing up his first year in a classroom with his neighborhood peers.

Jude began his educational career in a classroom with other students with special needs, but based on his individual needs, he was not thriving and was not having a positive experience, even crying about going to school. During the 2024-2025 school year, he was integrated into a general education classroom at the school he'd been attending for a few years, and it was a success. Now that he's in a general ed classroom at his boundary school, he can't wait to go to school in the mornings.

"I can just tell he's thriving, so that just makes me happy as his mom to just know that he's happy to be there," Kim Garrett said.

Jude is with his peers the majority of the day and also works one-on-one with an aide in an empty classroom for part of the time.

"It's just been fun to see them get creative," Kim Garrett said. "I know Jude's fourth-grade teacher learned that first grade has the same science curriculum as fourth grade. And so she didn't need to reinvent the wheel to include Jude. She just went to the first-grade curriculum that the district provides and pulls out mini lessons for Jude, so then he's doing the same thing, but it's just on a little bit of a scaled-down version, and so he can be with the rest of his peers for gen ed for science."

Jude has really improved in reading and writing and has made friends with the kids in his neighborhood, whom his family had never met before he went to school there. Kids from school stop by to say "hi" to Jude and to bring gifts on special occasions.

"The adults didn't have to sit down with them and say, 'Hey, you need to include Jude or be nice to him or go out of your way to treat him special … they just do," Kim Garrett said. "Kids are just so in tune with kindness and kind of stepping up to what they need to do to help somebody like Jude feel included, and it's just really cool."

Kim Garrett has worked closely with Julianna Woodbury, the director of special education at Weber School District, to discuss and provide feedback on inclusion practices for students with special needs in the district.

Woodbury said the district is striving to view each student with disabilities as an individual with specific needs rather than categorizing them by diagnosis. She said that some students need services at a school outside their neighborhood, while others attend their neighborhood schools but receive additional help there. It all depends on where they are on the "continuum of placement."

"We try really hard … to just follow the spirit and the intention of special education rule and law and have those really be individualized conversations with families," Woodbury said.

During the summer of 2025, Weber School District met with parents, special educators, related service providers, general educators, and administrators to discuss the book "Your Students, My Students, Our Students," which is about an inclusive mindset that leads to inclusive practices. They discussed barriers they are facing as a district and potential solutions.

One of their discussions revolved around what inclusion would look like, sound like and feel like at Weber schools. Woodbury said they talked about it looking like active participation, goal setting, friendships and proximity to peers, it would sound like the students staying on task, showcasing individual skills and receiving encouragement and it would feel like them being part of the class, having a sense of belonging and safety and feeling that they're a valued team member.

Regarding how it's gone this school year at Jude's boundary school, Woodbury said, "I've heard really positive outcomes and growth from the school perspective."

Woodbury desires for parents to reach out if they've had struggles with their student. She loves working with parents who are proactively advocating for their child.

"I think … an ideal is that teams are able to come together, and I love it when I'm able to be a part of a team and we come up with a really … novel or out of the box solution to maybe a challenge or a barrier," Woodbury said. "That's really exciting to me when everybody's kind of behind it and has that good 'can-do' mindset of, 'Yeah, let's give this a try.' That's really fulfilling and happy for me."

One resource both Kim Garrett and Woodbury recommended was the Utah Parent Center, "a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping parents assist their children, youth, and young adults with disabilities and special healthcare needs to lead inclusive, productive lives within the community, all for free," according to the Utah Parent Center website.

Natalie Allgood, a regional parent consultant with the Utah Parent Center, said the organization gathers all the resources for families who have children with disabilities that they might be looking for and disseminates it back to them. For example, if a parent called in to say they were having a hard time finding a child care center for their son or daughter with autism, the center would do the research for them and help connect them with the right fit.

The Utah Parent Center serves all of Utah, including rural areas and Native American tribes. The Utah Parent Center parent consultants are trained in procedural safeguards and rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and can consult with parents when they feel their voices aren't being heard by a school or school district, helping them communicate and develop solutions.

"My hope always is to get the team thinking outside of that box and really looking at that individual student and his or her needs so that we are building an individual education plan."

Three of Allgood's four children have special needs. She thinks inclusion is so important from a young age because young kids don't see those differences.

"All they see is, 'Oh, this kid's really fun to be around.' And so that's kind of where we want the community to be headed, because one day our kids with disabilities are going to be adults," Allgood said. "And we know this as a parent, a lot of time educators are looking at that grade level or that elementary or that junior high, and we're looking at building those relationships so that one day someone wants to hire our children."

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