Special needs ministry policies: Questions worth answering

This post is part of a series I'm writing about special needs ministry policies. I'll be sharing ours in full once they're finalized, and I'll also provide links to those of a few other special needs ministries as well. Here's a list of the other topics I've already addressed in the series:

•  Your special needs ministry policies are worthless if they only live on the shelf.
• Special needs ministry policies: Start with the WHY
• Special needs ministry policies: HOW do you identify individuals who might need support? 
• Special needs ministry policies: HOW do you define roles?

I asked at the end of my first post in this series if anyone had any policy-related questions. Tammy responded with a great list, which I'll begin answering on Monday. I know, though, that answers to some of these question vary among churches, so my responses will only provide insights from me; while I know about the practices at several other churches, I've only served in special needs ministry at Providence Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC, so my suggestions may be influenced by my own setting. Because of that, I would love to give you the opportunity to consider some of her questions, respond to them, and/or add some of your own questions in the comments.

Here's the list, taken from the comments section of this post:

how are age groups decided for classes of people w/intellectual disabilities?

what if a teen w/a preschool level of functioning & sensory processing difficulty cannot handle the loud music of the youth program? Should the other youth have to have thier music volume lowered? should the teen attend a younger aged class? should the teen be moved outside the classroom where it is quieter?wants to attend a grade school, or pre-school class?

what if an adult w/low level physical & intellectual abilities wants to come and we don't have an adult spec. needs class? (they don't fit in with children or youth or adults).

Should a child or youth be allowed to push someone in a wheelchair? aren't there liability issues?

Should a non-verbal child be included in AWANAs where the main goal to reciting memorized Bible verses?

How many people w/disabilities are needed before a class should be set up for them? is it ok to have 1 class for all ages?

AT what age is a person too old to attend a younger class of typical kids?

how do we determine if the person should be included in a regular class or needs a special class & what if there isn't a special class for an individual's age group?
Is it unfair to expect accommodation for an adult when there are no other adults requesting it?

what if the person vocalizes loudly during a church service or is distracting by their movements or other appearances? should they be required to go to the 'baby room', 'tv room'?

should people who have difficulty articulating, carry a tune, and/or are non-verbal be allowed to join the choir?

should youth w/special needs be allowed to participate in youth trips? what about liability & extra assistance/supervision?

 Choose a question, and leave a comment with an answer! Or leave a comment with one or more questions you'd like to add to the list. On Monday, I'll begin posting my answers.

Special needs ministry policies: HOW do you define roles? (specifically one-on-one support volunteers)

This post is part of a series I'm writing about special needs ministry policies. I'll be sharing ours in full once they're finalized, and I'll also provide links to those of a few other special needs ministries as well. Here's a list of the other topics I've already addressed in the series:

•  Your special needs ministry policies are worthless if they only live on the shelf.
• Special needs ministry policies: Start with the WHY
• Special needs ministry policies: HOW do you identify individuals who might need support?

As you consider special needs ministry, you need to define roles. I feel a little unqualified to raise this point because I haven't even written the description for my own role. Because our policies are incomplete right now, I've been prioritizing some sections and de-prioritizing others, and writing the job description for Access Ministry coordinator hasn't been near the top of the list. I will write it before I finalize the other policies, and I'll share it once it's ready!

This post, though, is about how we define one-on-one support volunteers in Access Ministry. We call those volunteers "buddies" in our ministry, so that's the term I'll use here. I know other churches that use "shadow" or "friend" or other names instead, so go with whatever works at your church!

Especially in a young or small inclusion ministry, it's hard for other volunteers to know what to expect from a buddy. Are they the teacher for that child? Are they just another helper for the class? Is it okay to ask them to go make copies or pick up the snack? If the child they're paired with is out of town, should they still come to the class?

Some of those questions can be answered with a policy, but some depend on the child and situation. Here's the draft of our written policy on the subject:

When a one-on-one buddy is provided for an individual with special needs in a class, it is important for that buddy and for the teachers to understand what a buddy is and what a buddy isn’t. The table below should help.

What a buddy is	What a buddy isn’t
IS a friend and support  for that one individual	IS NOT the teacher for that individual. The teacher for the rest of the class is the teacher for this individual as well
IS a helper so that the child can be included in the class	IS NOT solely responsible for the child’s inclusion
IS assigned to one individual, but able to help with other things if it does not prevent her from fulfilling her role as a buddy	IS NOT an extra person to get snack or set up craft time or make copies or do any of the other things you could use help with
IS trained with the curriculum to consider the needs of the child and possible modifications	IS NOT in charge of making all of those modifications
May need to assist the individual in the restroom with another adult	May not take the individual to the restroom alone; it is never appropriate for a volunteer to be alone with an individual with special needs

If you have any questions about the role of a buddy, please contact the Access Ministry coordinators.

 If you church has buddies in your ministry, I'd love to know how your role definition compares to this one. And, please, feel free to offer any suggestions - this is the draft, not a final version, so now is the best time for me to polish it!

Special needs ministry policies: HOW do you identify individuals who might need support?

The question posed in the title might seem like an odd one, especially if you are just starting a special needs ministry. For some individuals - like those with physical impairments or obvious outward features of a disability, such as those with Down syndrome - it's not hard to identify the presence of a disability. For others who have less obvious special needs - like Kim's daughter from Friday's guest post - it could be hard to know if a person might need more support.

(And, by the way, I have written about this before and shared an earlier draft of our policy there. This is more detailed and updated than that post, though there are couple spots of redundancy, for which I apologize!)

Won't families let us know? Why do we need to do anything proactively?

Honestly, when I began coordinating Access Ministry at Providence, this "how" element didn't occur to me. I knew we have a handful of kids who needed support who had already been identified, and I knew we already had a class for adults with disabilities. Those kids and adults, though, all had visible disabilities.

Some families will let you know. Some won't. Some will let someone else know - a Sunday school teacher, a pastor, a youth leader, or even the greeter at the door.

Some will do what one of our families did: have several conversations about difficult behavior in class with the child's teacher before mentioning, "well, he does have autism." Those teachers had no idea until then. They were flummoxed by the child's behavior but, with no background in special needs and no indication of a diagnosis, the teachers just handled the behavioral difficulties in the same day they had handled misbehavior in the past, not realizing there was more going on.

In an example like that last one, you may not be able to do anything to get the parents to disclose the diagnosis of their child right away. That's why it's crucial to demonstrate grace to everyone you encounter. No one is an inconvenience. No one. No one. Breed that mentality in your children's ministry and youth ministry and adult ministries at your church. You don't know anyone's full story. Think about how you would feel if you had a sign around your neck with your full story. It's tough to be vulnerable. If you expect every person to disclose every special need on day one, then you're expecting them to be vulnerable.

Vulnerability grows from trust. Is your church a place that breeds trust? In other words, is your ministry fully directed by the One who is ultimately trustworthy, or are you trying to run it from your own flesh and strength and energy?

So... How do you identify individuals who need support?

I'll paste the section about that from our guidebook  below, but first let me share a couple of things I do that aren't in the written policies:

1. I aim to make sure all of our ministry team members know about Access Ministry. Our church is large, and it is housed in a former hotel building, with the old ballroom as our worship center and the hotel rooms as our classrooms. (We got rid of the bar less than a decade ago, and this past year we removed the check-in desk in the lobby as we renovated the main areas.) I mention all that to emphasize that not everyone knows who I am and what we do. Beyond that, not everyone knows where to find me. I couldn't assume that people knew what we did or how to respond if an individual with special needs showed up or called the church. As a starting point, make sure you inform everyone involved in welcoming people as they arrive because those are the folks who may have first interaction before you ever meet the person or family. Same goes for informing whoever answers the phone during the week, so they know what to do.
2. I submit to God's sovereignty. I won't know every disability represented in our church. I can't control every element. I can't be fully trustworthy. I simply can't do it myself. And I don't have to. God can. And he's the best one to do it.

Now to our written policy:

Identification of individuals with special needs

We do our best to identify individuals with special needs who may need additional support to function well in our church body. Some disabilities, though, are not immediately obvious in appearance. Additionally, others are manifested by behaviors that seem disobedient or intentional. And some individuals, especially some of our youngest participants, may have special needs that haven’t been diagnosed yet. Because of this, show grace to each person you encounter.

If we find out that an individual in your class has a disability or other special needs, we will let you know. If a parent or individual shares with you that he/she or his/her child has a disability or other diagnosed special need or that the child is going through the process of diagnosis, please let the Access Ministry coordinators or a Family Discipleship staff member know and do not assume that we already know.

Is there anything I've left out here? How do you identify individuals who need support at your church or, if you don't serve in special needs ministry, how do you think that could be done well?

Weekly round-up! {8/1/11}

What?!? It's August? Anyone else feel like they're not quite sure how that happened?

Invisible: Yes, this is the post from my blog on Friday. I'm linking back to it. Kim did a fantastic and heartfelt job of describing her family's recent visit to another church and the challenges that can arise from such visits for families with special needs. If you haven't read it, go. Now. I promise this post will still be here when you get back.

This article from Education Week highlights the usefulness of physically acting out texts as a way for kids to learn more effectively. This applies to kids and adults with special needs as well, and you could certainly use this knowledge in your next Bible story lesson: Don't just tell it; help them act it out!

Decades after ADA became a law, disabled people are still fighting for full inclusion (and, might I add, person-first language in headlines, but that's another topic...): I spend a lot of time exhorting the church to welcome people with special needs. But let's also acknowledge that it's not just church culture but also secular culture that fails sometimes and succeeds others in this area.

I love this quote from my friend Wanda's post about making sure outreach activities are centered on the gospel and not the outreach. This is what a young women at their after-school tutoring ministry said to her: “The ministry where I serve does tutoring and sticks Jesus in. You do Jesus and stick tutoring in.” Let the latter be true of special needs ministry as well.

Pray for Shepherds Ministries, a Christian-centered organization dedicated to helping people with intellectual disabilities as they lost some funding and had to cut 32 jobs. I haven't had any personal interaction with this ministry so I can't vouch for or recommend them, but I've seen their name pop up where good Christ-honoring, life-affirming things are happening.

If blogs could have BFFs, The Works of God Displayed would want to be friends with the folks over at The Gospel Coalition. Last week, one of their posts was, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made in a Fallen World. While I did like the post, I felt like it was a bit of a downer. It was scripturally sound and mostly encouraging, but I got hung up on one line as I read it: "So while some are given the devastating charge of walking through this life more physically broken than the rest, we can trust that this life is not the end of the story." Sometimes disability can feel devastating. And sometimes it just feels like part of life. (Please don't get me wrong, though. It was a good post, worth the read.)

Here's some encouraging news from Mark 2 Ministries about a camp they're involved with for children who are Deaf in the Ukraine.

Here a some suggestions from Jessica at Four plus an angel about Ways to Support Someone Who is Grieving. And, as my friend Jolene Philo would point out, parents who have children with special needs grieve too, not because their child died but because some of the dreams they had for that child may have had to die.

Next up, a post that every ministry leader needs to understand about the parent's role as advocate and that every parent needs to read to consider how to be wise advocates for your child(ren) while still being an ambassador for Christ: I called myself an advocate. But I was really an assassin. (I know this will interest Barb and Katie particularly, given conversations I had with each of you last week. Check it out, ladies!)

ADHD May Hinder Safe Street Crossing: ... but not for the reason you might think. It's not because of inattention, but related instead to the ability to process the information necessary to cross safely. Time management problem for individuals with ADHD are often viewed as an attention problem, but this study (albeit with a small sample) suggests that it's more of a problem with executive function, the ability to process information and make judgments to control behavior in response. For church leaders, this is helpful to know because we're not understanding fully what's going on with our members with ADHD if we just think about it as an attention issue.

When kids laugh at another kid who happens to have special needs, that's not okay. When it's the adults who are laughing, I don't have the words to convey my emotions. Here's a post about adults doing just that: Don't Laugh at Me on the SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder) Blogger Network

Amy Fenton Lee is a gem of resources for special needs ministry. She aims to equip folks who are doing what I'm doing in local churches. And for that, I am thankful. Here are some wonderful posts of hers in the past week:

• Special Needs Ministry Checklist at Ministry-to-Children.com, the blog of another gifted supporter of church-based ministry, Tony Kummer
• A post about the special needs ministry entrance at Stonebriar Community Church
• A post about the special needs ministry check-in board at the same church
• A post about the special needs ministry classroom at the same church
• And more posts coming this week from her visit at Stonebriar. Make sure these are on your radar!

Is it possible to give too much praise to preschoolers? Good tips on giving specific, person-affirming praise to preschoolers (much of which applies to some older individuals with special needs too)

And you know I love to end by highlighting some churches who are welcoming people with disabilities:

• one that hosted an Autism Speak Walk as one of many things they did to rally around one family at their church after the four-year-old was diagnosed with autism
• one that is hosting an Eagle Scout project to raise awareness about autism
• one social ministry of a denomination that offers therapeutic horseback riding for children and adults with disabilities
• an article describing one church as having "exuberant hospitality" for people with special needs and others
• one church that is reaching out to kids with special needs through a kickball outreach
• a church's ministry, called Unveiled, that involves adults with disabilities in teaching the children's classes
• a church gate collection to raise money for guide dogs that took place in Ireland this past weekend (and it's interesting to me that these types of collections are done regularly in parts of Ireland as a way for the church to partner with community organizations)

And, if you're still reading now, THANK YOU! I know this week's round-up was a long one. I hope you'll come back later this week as I dive into special needs ministry policy and share with you a mini-lesson I'll be teaching next Sunday to our typical seventh grade Sunday school class.

Different members. One body. {1 Cor 12:12-26}

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body— Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

1 Corinthians 12:12-26, ESV