Transcript
Lori Boll: Well, hello, Sylvia and Bethany, and welcome to our Inclusion Spotlight series.
Lori Boll: Thank you for having us. Hello to you, too.
Silvia Brozzon: It’s great to see you.
Lori Boll: Well, you’re here from Paraguay.
Silvia Brozzon: Yes, Paraguay, South America.
Lori Boll: Yeah. Well, tell us just a little bit about Paraguay, what you love about living there.
Silvia Brozzon: Paraguay is what we call the heart of South America. It’s landlocked right in the middle of South America. It’s not very big, actually. It’s quite small, not many people. But it’s a beautiful place, lots of green. And what I like about Paraguay is the people here are extremely warm and welcoming. So everybody that comes to visit is just highly impressed with how warm and welcoming Paraguayan people are.
But I think Bethany can tell you more, because we welcomed Bethany a year and a half ago to Paraguay.
Bethany: So this is my second year here. It’s interesting. One of the things that stands out to me, a student actually mentioned today, too. I feel like from early on here, my family just felt really grounded and calm, and it felt like we settled here a lot faster than other places. And it just felt good.
And I was talking to a student this morning who’s lived, you know, in five different countries, and I asked the same question, like, “What do you like about living here?” And he said, “I just like how it’s so calm.”
Lori Boll: I was like, oh, me too. Calm. Everyone needs that in their life. You better watch out, you’re going to get lots of applications here in Paraguay.
Silvia: There’s a saying that is very common with tranquilo, tranquilo. The Paraguayans use that a lot. Just take it easy, calm down. They’re very slow with time, too. So yeah, I love it.
Lori Boll: Great. Well, we first met this summer at the Expanding and Enhancing Student Support Services Summer Institute, which was hosted by the Office of Overseas Schools and in partnership with SENIA International. I’m curious what insights or affirmations from that week have shaped your school’s current direction with inclusion.
Silvia Brozzon: Well, I think as a whole, we were very impressed with everything we learned and talking to other people. And for me, it was two things that really caught my attention and made me want to come to the school and say, “We have to join SENIA.”
We became a member school this year, and we’re looking forward to the work we can do together. But the importance of family partnerships and building trust with our families is something we’ve been trying to do for a while.
Silvia Brozzon: And a lot of the conversations we had at the institute helped us think, okay, let’s have meetings, let’s include all our learning support teachers, our counselors, and just…let’s listen to the families. Let’s listen to what they have to say before we’re telling them, “Okay, this is what we want to do, these are the accommodations we want to put in place.”
Let’s listen to them, because after all, they’re the ones that know their child the best. And so just listening to them…actually, one of our parents, before we went to the SENIA Institute, told us that they wanted their son, who had the same neurodivergency as their daughter, to come in and tell us what it was like from a student’s point of view, someone who had gone through the system. And I thought that was really interesting and thought, you know, we should have thought of that before: bringing in people, students that have lived it, that can tell us, “This is what really worked for me. This did not work.” So I think that really helped us change our conversations with families.
And then also about language, the importance of language and what language we use when we’re talking with families, when we’re talking with our students. And for me, it’s more with the families of students who are not neurodivergent, so they understand how important it is to bring these students into our community. And the way we speak about everybody is so important.
Silvia Brozzon: So those are the two things that really caught my attention and helped me think about what we need to do moving forward. And just talking to other people, networking, seeing the importance of being part of an organization like SENIA, where we can work together, learn from other people, and just continue on this path.
Bethany (described by Silvia): Yeah, I agree. I think that was a great grounding for us for the school year, where everybody was on the same page.
And then another thing I loved about the conference is I felt like each of the sessions that I went to offered solutions and strategies for specific needs that we had also. We’ve been talking a lot about middle schoolers and executive functioning and how we can support them. And I was able to share that information with our middle school principal and team, which they had already been thinking and wrestling with: How do we approach this as a division, as a school?
Bethany: But I went to April’s session, was able to share resources from that, and they were able to start off the year as a whole team saying, “Here’s how we support at the beginning of the class. Here’s how we support at the end of the class.”
So for me, what was great about that is that it wasn’t just for a small subgroup of students. It was for all of the students that we have in middle school, and it was really able to make an impact for an immediate need that we were already trying to problem-solve.
Lori Boll: Right. Yeah.
Bethany: I had the opportunity in consultation times, and during that time, you know, we talked a lot about student choice and students being empowered to be able to drive their learning and their goals.
So I was able to bring that back. We expanded our advanced learning program to our middle school, and middle schoolers were able to choose, like, “Here’s a strength I want to focus on. Here’s an area for social-emotional development I want to focus on, and here’s why it’s important to me.”
So like Silvia said, we came back with this common grounding of: How are we talking about neurodiversity? How are we building these really strong partnerships with families? And the conference really helped us with our next steps in specific areas as well, which was great.
Lori Boll: That’s really great to hear. And I just appreciate listening. I think some of the goals that we had going into the institute, what we were probably expecting schools to walk away with, I think you did. But you’ve expanded on some kind of, I guess, hidden goals that maybe we were thinking about, but it really came to you and impacted you in a different way than what we expected. So that’s really encouraging.
Silvia Brozzon: So…
Lori Boll: You mentioned that you came into the institute saying that you are an inclusive school, but where would you say you are in your journey toward inclusive education?
Silvia Brozzon: I think we are an inclusive school when we say that, but I don’t feel we can say we’re completely inclusive. We still have a ways to go. I think we’re on the right path.
I’ve been here for 30 years, and ever since I started here, we have had learning support teachers, we have counselors, and we have added these positions, more of these staff members, as our population grows.
But it seemed like our advanced learners…we had something that we called TAG then—it was enrichment—and we kept changing. So it was like we were lacking systems. And I think that we really moved forward when, two years ago, we decided, and the board backed us up on this, that we needed a Director of Student Services, a person that could focus their time on all these services that would help all our students, neurodivergent or not, but that would be able to be the leader for this team.
And that’s when we opened the position, and we were very fortunate to hire Bethany, who came with a wealth of experience, and that really helped us start putting systems into place and also aligning throughout the divisions.
So we’ve had families here that have been here for many, many years, and they have already said they’ve seen some changes with Bethany, with the meetings we’ve had with parents. So I think those are things that really are moving us forward.
And now being partners with SENIA and having an organization that we can count on for resources…we still have a long way to go. I think we have to be able to admit more neurodivergent students and be more open. So that’s a path that we’re on right now. And I feel confident that we’re on the right path, but we still have a ways to go.
Bethany: Yeah, I would say a lot of our work over the past two years has been the alignment piece, you know. So it doesn’t sound super exciting, but last year we focused on our handbooks for student support.
We brought the counseling team and learning support team together, both to talk about: How do we work together, and how do we support the whole community? And we really laid out, “This is what it looks like in detail.”
And I feel like that level of clarity just supported the team in being able to move much faster after we had that documented.
We also were able to expand the programming. So we had the learning support program that worked with students who needed intervention and more support, but we didn’t have a program during the school day for students who needed more of a challenge.
So we were able to expand that, do some pilots, and then build it all the way through. This year it’s third through eighth grade; next year it will be through ninth grade.
Yeah. So I feel like we’ve had the right people on the team for a long time—super passionate people who have areas of expertise both in a school setting and out of a school setting. But really, our ability to come together, get really clear on the details of “What does this look like in action from week to week, month to month?” then helped us move a lot faster after that point.
Silvia Brozzon: And also, I think what we talked about a lot is the collaboration and the meetings, and aligning the work that we had in high school and helping teachers in high school see that, you know, what are strategies that we can use with neurodivergent learners but that are beneficial for everyone—and helping them problem-solve.
So moving from kind of complaining or “I can’t do this, it’s too hard” to “What can we do to help others?” So just aligning that with all the divisions was really helpful.
And the MTSS framework—we’re using it everywhere and helping teachers understand how it works, and making it a part of our daily, everyday practice—has really helped us too. I think those are milestones, definitely.
Lori Boll: You know, I was really excited to talk with your team because of where you are in this process. I think it’s really important that when we say an Inclusion Spotlight series, that we’re not always focusing on the schools who are “doing it all,” maybe the larger schools with so many more resources and, you know, they have the Life Centered Education programs and things like that.
We recognize that inclusion is…there’s not a finish line, and everyone is somewhere in this journey. Right. And so I appreciate your transparency of where you’re at and where you’re heading.
Silvia Brozzon: And I think that is something that we really are looking into, because this is a change of culture. The board has to back us up, the parents have to understand. And I think we’re getting there, but it still needs work, and I think that’s the process we’re in right now.
Silvia Brozzon: I do feel we’ve come a long way, and I think that we’re on the right path. But as you said, we’re going to be transparent: we still have a ways to go.
Bethany: I think one thing, taking into account our size—like Silvia said, we have learning support teachers, we have counselors, we don’t have speech therapists, we don’t have occupational therapists, school psych. So there’s also a lot of stuff we don’t have.
I think one thing that we’re doing really well right now is utilizing all staff members to support students and really having divisional structures that target that. So, you know, in elementary school we have our “What I Need” time. We have every single staff member in elementary jumping in at that point saying, “Great, how can I support for whatever the student needs, whether that’s enrichment, prevention, reinforcement?”
Bethany: In middle school, our learning support teacher has been instrumental in helping to kick off the advanced learning program there. In the past, she had only worked with students on individual learning plans.
This year she’s jumped fully into: How do we provide that time where students are setting their own goals, working towards challenge goals, working on the social-emotional front in collaboration with counselors?
So I almost think in some ways it’s been to our advantage that we do have this small but mighty staff, because it’s forced a lot of really positive collaboration and teamwork that I think, if we had these other roles, we wouldn’t have gone to right away.
think that’s brought some buy-in, too, and just shared responsibility for what we’re doing and why. It feels like this is important work for all of us versus, you know, I’ve been in other settings where it’s trying to kind of convince different groups of why we should provide these different support or enrichment opportunities. So that’s been really nice here.
Silvia Brozzon: What is also, I think, really nice for us is that many of our—well, all of our learning support teachers are local educators who are educational psychologists. So they really know the community.
So we’ve been able to tap into professional help and professional expertise from outside. We know we have bilingual speech therapists, or we have OTs that have worked with our kids, so we can refer them. And that has been really helpful.
And our learning support teachers and most of our counselors, as I said—we have two, three counselors that are US-hired, but we have others that are local, and they really know the community. And Paraguayans are passionate, hardworking people. They throw all of themselves in, and they want to help and they want to be there for the kids.
So I think that’s a big plus that we have in our community.
Lori Boll: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And I did want to ask further about that. How have you ensured multilingual learners have equitable access to learning and to the full school experience?
Silvia Brozzon: We are a little different than many of the international schools in the sense that we’re about 65% local Paraguayans that start with us in Kinder 4, and then 35% are international students, Americans and from other nationalities.
So we do have…and our students start English instruction day one. That’s why we hired learning support teachers that are bilingual, so that they can help the students in the language that they need. They can help them in their native language.
And we know that early on it’s important that they’re strong in their native language. So that’s why we hire these bilingual learning support teachers and counselors.
We try to have as many people as we can who speak or understand Spanish, and we’re trying to help them in that way.
We have a team of teachers that are working with multilingual learners and research with the MLRC. So there’s a lot of work on that. We know how important it is because that’s our goal: we want our students to be bilingual or multilingual and bicultural or multicultural. That’s what we want them to achieve because they are receiving a dual diploma, a US and Paraguayan diploma.
Bethany: Yeah, and our data systems also support that. So we collect academic data on both English and Spanish achievement all the way starting K–5, so kindergarten through 12th grade. Because most students get both the Paraguayan diploma and the US diploma.
From a system standpoint, I think that’s super helpful because biliteracy and student growth in both languages is always part of the conversation, and we’re always looking at both and seeing: How can we leverage one language to support the other? What are the connections that we’re seeing?
In starting our advanced learning program, we were really intentional on the resources that we chose. We chose resources that are meant for multilingual communities because we wanted to prevent as much bias as we could within that eligibility criteria.
So we use CogAT, which does have more visuals, as one of our data points. And then we use a teacher survey, it’s called TOPS—the Teacher Observation of Potential in Students—which is also pretty holistic.
I looked at some surveys, teacher surveys, that only looked at math achievement, literacy achievement, science achievement. This one includes their leadership, their creativity, their passion for different areas, and it includes what that can look like both in a positive sign and maybe a negative side at times.
So yeah, I feel like we really want to build and leverage our students’ strengths in being multilingual and definitely want to make sure that students are not being held back because of their English proficiency for different opportunities.
Silvia Brozzon: And we also started piloting this year the WIDA. So we’re looking at our scores and we say, “Okay, maybe this student…it’s an English proficiency issue, not really anything else.” So making sure we rule out everything and can help the student with the needs they really have and how we can support them the best.
So I think that’s important. Really important.
Lori Boll: Yeah, and very inspirational. I’m curious, how many students do you have in your school?
Silvia Brozzon: Eight hundred.
Lori Boll: Eight hundred, okay.
Silvia Brozzon: Yes. And we are Kinder 4 all the way to 12th grade, and we have sections per grade level. So the classes are 20, 21, 22 max in elementary, and then in high school there’s still 60 as the cap that we close at per grade level.
Silvia Brozzon: But it’s different because they have APs or they might be in math classes, so there might be a little bit more students in one than another. But that’s how many students we have—800.
Lori Boll: Yeah, okay. Bethany, you come from a US background and an international context, and I’m curious what inclusive practices have transferred well and what you’ve had to probably adapt at your school.
Bethany: Yeah. So the MTSS framework I think has fit in and transferred really well here. Again, it already was in a lot of the beliefs that we had here as a school, and I think MTSS brought more of the systems, especially across divisions, and brought that alignment piece.
So that’s something I think that had been talked about but was adapted really quickly. I would say within the first semester of my role being created, we learned about MTSS across all divisions, and it just fit really quickly, really well.
One adaptation that we’ve had to make, or just consideration, is, you know, as Silvia was saying, our learning support teachers are local Paraguayan staff members. They often come with psychology and educational psychologist backgrounds, so not the typical—like, there’s no special education teacher certification here in Paraguay.
Bethany: So we’ve done a lot of work on academic interventions, especially in a small group setting. I’ve seen this in the past maybe with the speech therapist role—a speech therapist who’s worked in a clinic versus a school setting: that’s an adjustment, going from one-to-one, very detailed notes, to small-group settings. You’re doing Tier 2 interventions for multiple groups throughout the day.
So again, we have smart, passionate people. Really it was just making sure: How are we leveraging their strengths and acknowledging those? And how are we creating shared learning opportunities so that we are coming together about the school-based MTSS intervention model, especially for academics?
So we did a lot of work on that last year. Our teachers are definitely up and running with it and at this point continuing to make improvements and really digging more into progress monitoring.
Silvia Brozzon: And I think it’s important to mention that we have actually a great ally in the Ministry of Education here in Paraguay, because the Ministry has very strong inclusive laws and they’re like, every child should be met where they’re at.
And so we’ve worked with them very closely, and we have what they call in Spanish mesas de trabajo—working tables. So we’ll invite them over and we’ll present different cases, and they’re always supporting the school and saying, “The student, we have to meet the student where they’re at.”
So we have that backup from the Ministry of Education because we are accredited by them as well. So that has really helped. It has helped our teachers also understand how this is important for the school, for the country, and we have to do all we can to meet the requirements.
Silvia Brozzon: So that’s been really helpful for us.
Lori Boll: That’s fantastic. I wish more countries were that thoughtful about inclusion. So you’ve mentioned your teachers and bringing them on board. I’m wondering how you engage and empower them to take ownership of these practices in your school.
Silvia Brozzon: Yeah, I think that what I mentioned before, the change we’ve had in the student success meetings—where instead of hearing problems, we’re thinking, “Okay, let’s think of strategies that worked. Everybody, let’s be more solution-oriented.”
So people are sharing what has worked in their classes. So they’re bringing solutions and they’re feeling that they’re part of this: “Okay, what has worked in your class with Franco, and what has worked in your class?” So they’re bringing in more solutions; it’s more solution-oriented.
And I think a big piece of that is the way Bethany has restructured these to make them feel they’re more part of it and it’s more of a collaboration than just them listening to something.
Bethany: We’re also trying to really respond to both data from our students and build capacity in teachers. So one example that’s new this year—we don’t have outcome data yet, but we feel like we have some positive momentum behind it—is our student culture data.
At the beginning of the year it showed that not all students felt connected to adults in the building. Not all students felt a strong sense of belonging, which is related to student support as well, making sure they have those foundational needs met.
As a high school team, we devote one PD meeting a month to really focusing on social-emotional skills that we as adults can both have in ourselves and model to others.
Teachers were involved in saying, “Okay, which of the questions on the survey do we most want to impact through our shared work?” And then we were able to come back together. We decided on action steps, like gathering more data from students, because the survey questions told us some students didn’t feel like they belonged, but it didn’t tell us why or what helped.
So we had teachers volunteer—we had two teachers per grade level volunteer—175 student responses, and spent yesterday’s PD meeting in small groups going through that data to really bring student voice into the room, which I think is really powerful for teachers.
Because I think all teachers care about their students having a positive experience at school where they’re learning and growing every day. And sometimes when we just present the numbers, that doesn’t feel as personal or as impactful.
So I think for us, pairing both the numbers, which was the flag for us of, “Okay, we need to pause and work on this,” along with the student voice of what really makes a difference to our students…you know, some students were saying, “It’s a teacher saying hi to me in the hall,” or “It’s a teacher spending more time with me after school to help with something I’m struggling in.”
So they weren’t these huge acts that are outside of our realm of control. A lot of them were actually daily things that we could do pretty easily.
I think that’s something that’s really helped build the shared ownership and responsibility and creates the conditions where then every student can really thrive here. So it’s work I’m proud of, and I think we have some positive momentum.
Lori Boll: Well, I really like how you included the teachers in the data review. You know, it’s so easy sometimes for the leadership to take the data, make sense of it, and then present it, versus them actually looking at it and, you know, utilizing it.
Bethany: Yeah, and we had leadership preview the data before we brought it to teachers. And during that meeting, you know, we had a leadership, an admin member at every table with a group of teachers digging into the data, you know, making a poster of the key findings, sharing out.
And I think that also demonstrates, hopefully, an attitude of our perspective of, like, we’re all in this together. Yeah. We’re all working on this together, and we’re all learning together. So yeah, I think…
Lori Boll: Yeah, I think it will yield some good outcomes.
Bethany: Yeah.
Lori Boll: Did you create the survey, or was that a survey that you found somewhere?
Bethany: We used—I think last year was our first year—it’s the Safe School, Safe Communities survey, and our students took it, grades five through grade 12. Our faculty and our parents also took the surveys.
And then we had a representative from the organization come work with our leadership team during our summer retreat before the school year started. That was super impactful, too, because, I mean, we had at least a day and a half as a leadership team to ask questions, synthesize the data in different ways.
And for me, that’s…I think that’s one of the main levers for this year that really made that data stick. Sometimes we get data in and say, like, “Okay, let’s do A, B, C,” and then we’re done with it.
I think just us as a leadership team having that time to really understand the data helped it to stay top of mind, you know, even in November, several months later.
Silvia Brozzon: And also being very, I think, transparent with the community and with our staff. These are our wins, our celebrations: look, people feel safe. These are things that we need to work on. And then choosing—because you can’t do everything.
Sometimes that happens to me: I want to try to do everything. It’s impossible. So let’s choose our priorities. Okay, what are the things we want to focus on that we can do well this year? And I think that has really helped.
And it also gives the teachers a feeling, “Okay, we’re not expected to do everything, but this is what we will do.” And then the high school student survey was just going more in-depth into, “Okay, why do our students not feel connected in high school?” And the teachers helped us with those questions.
Silvia Brozzon: So I think there’s a lot of teacher voice and student voice.
Lori Boll: That’s fantastic. Well, you’ve mentioned celebration, so I’m wondering if you have a story or an example of a student whose experience has changed because of your inclusion initiatives.
Silvia Brozzon: Yeah, I think we…yeah, I can go with one, because he’s a 10th grader. He’s autistic, and he started with us in Kinder 4. I’ve known this little boy—now he’s a young man—since he started school with us.
And I remember holding on to him and saying, “It’s going to be okay, buddy. It’s going to be okay.” And, you know, he was so mad, and I remember having the conversations with his parents, and his parents were like…they didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.
But we really worked together. I mean, the family, they have been real partners in this and advocates of their child. And we just—you know, we had some really rough years, but we were like, “We can do it. We can do it.”
Today he’s a 10th grader who is the sweetest. He’ll say hello to me every morning. He’ll tell me how I’m doing. He’ll advocate for himself. You know, he’s still struggling in some classes. He tells me, “I really don’t like this class.”
But he is a success story. He talks about what he’s going to do when he leaves ASA, and he wants to go to the States and what he wants to do.
He’s not a child that will open up to other students, and it’s a little hard for him, but he’ll have conversations with some students. He’ll choose one or two students that he wants to be friends with. So I think it’s a real success story.
And his parents are super happy with his success and everything we’ve done. And again, this is a success story because the parents have been real partners.
And I remember the first meetings we had when he was in first grade. I remember the parents just looking at me and wanting to just probably, I don’t know, think, “What is she talking about?” And they were looking at me, and now we can just talk about it and look back and we are all so proud of this young man.
So it’s been amazing.
Bethany: Yeah, I think a positive about him too, specifically, is I really feel like we’re leveraging his strengths. So he’s in high school. He has the opportunity to do a few independent study classes on huge areas of strength for him that go beyond the curriculum that we teach here.
And he has times when, you know, he might just need a break during the day and he knows he can go to the learning support classroom to find some calm time and have that supportive adult there.
So I feel like we see all of him, we appreciate all of him, and our systems are able to match and kind of give him what he—or allow access to what he needs for the different parts of his school day.
Silvia Brozzon: And the learning support teacher, I mean, she is his biggest advocate. When she talks about him, she just lights up. “He’s not my little baby anymore. He’s not a baby anymore.” She’s like, “Don’t say that about him!”
The pride and joy she has is just so…It’s great to hear her talk about her kids because, you know, they’re her kids, and she’s so protective of them.
I mean, we have really good people here in our school that really are here for the kids.
Lori Boll: Yeah, you can see my smile because I can completely understand the feelings of that teacher. It’s just such a sense of pride.It is, it is. Well, looking ahead, what do you think your next big goal for inclusion is at ASA?
Silvia Brozzon: I think that for me…I had a conversation with one of our parents just the other day, and she said something that really rang a bell. I’ve been thinking about it, too.
We have to start taking—we have to take more neurodivergent children, because it really is, like we were talking with this parent, the benefits for everyone, for the other children. The empathy that these children create…
Like, I see children that have siblings that are not neurodivergent; they’re completely different. They’re so sensitive. It’s different.
So just helping the community see how much we are going to gain as a community, the more neurodivergent we are. I think that convincing everybody that that’s the path to go is important.
And we have to look at: How can we fund, or what can we do for the resources? Find ways to bring more children into our school that will add diversity and will add so much to the community, and talking to families and helping them understand. That, I think, is our path.
Lori Boll: And what advice would you give to another school at a similar stage?
Bethany: I think the importance of counselors, learning support, administrators working together to both plan for specific groups of students but also school-wide supports and needs.
That team being strong and really having this whole-school perspective, I think, has been one of the keys for us being able to move faster with a lot of initiatives. We’re working together as a team. That’s not always easy; it definitely has its challenges.
But really focusing on that core team so that one group doesn’t feel…you hear about silos, especially in student support. One doesn’t feel like, “I’m over here, advocating or fighting for my kids.” It’s us coming together as a team.
Because you can do that with two people; you can do that with 20 people. It doesn’t matter how few people you have—you can come together and really problem-solve and build this common vision.
So I think the strength of that team makes a huge difference.
Lori Boll: Yeah, I agree. Well, Sylvia and Bethany, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been truly a joy learning about your school and your journey. Congratulations.
Silvia Brozzon: Thank you. Yes, we’re very proud, and we hope to continue in this partnership with SENIA, too. So we’re going to be letting you know of our successes.
