East Greenwich High School Library: Unified Mentors

In the following report, Hanover Research describes research based strategies to support students before, during, and after they transition to Grade 9. This report includes a special focus on supporting English Learners as they begin their high school career.

The Preventable Failure: Improvements in High School Graduation Rates when High Schools Focus on the NinthGrade Year. UChicago study.

Neild, R. (2009). Falling off track during the transition to high school: What we know and what can be done. Future of Children, 19(1), 53-76.

Ensuring Successful Student Transitions from the Middle Grades to High School. Provides evidence as to why we need to focus on the transition to 9th grade.

Adjusting to the academic and social pressures that come with entering high school can create anxiety for students and families alike.

Transition planning at the secondary level.

Unified Schools begin with Special Olympics Unified Sports® to build inclusive school communities for young people of all abilities. This programming creates an environment where everyone feels welcome, valued, and included both in school and in their local community.

This qualitative study examines the perspectives of parents of youth with intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) who participated in Special Olympics Unified Sports®, a program in which high school students with and without IDD compete on the same team.

Special Olympics Unified Schools is an education and sports based strategy powered by an engaged student community that increases athletic and leadership opportunities for students with and without intellectual disabilities. This report outlines sports and schools programs.

Special Olympics Unified Schools promote meaningful social inclusion by bringing young people with and without intellectual disability (ID) together to create school communities that are accepting of all students using an inclusive sports model, Special Olympics Unified Sports®.

The Global Center for Inclusion in Education began in 2020 as a conceptual framework: it would serve as a centralized resource of support for the expanding network of Special Olympics Unified Schools with their three components of school based Unified Sports, Inclusive Youth Leadership, and Whole School Engagement. The foundational goal of the Global Center is to illuminate, broaden, and intensify the impact of the 2019 World Games in Abu Dhabi by driving targeted, grassroots change for social inclusion across the globe using the Middle East and North Africa Region as a foundation. This includes serving as a hub for evaluation research on inclusive programming, as well as for basic research on the development of inclusive mindsets across cultures. To help achieve this goal, the Center will support a series of research and policy briefs on topics critical to inclusion in education. These briefs will bring Special Olympics experts together with thought partners in the research and policy fields related to education and youth development and their intersection with Unified Sports programming.