All the room's a stage for Betz class

Plays help special education students get creative while they learn in the classroom

By BECKY THOMAS

Staff Reporter

What started as a way to pass the time during indoor recess has blossomed into an annual full-fledged stage production in one local classroom.

It started during a winter six years ago when para-educators noticed the students in Darla Fitzpatrick's self-contained special education classroom at Betz Elementary were getting restless. For a group of students of different ages with individual challenges, restlessness can soon turn to chaos.

Para-educator Sarah Crippen said it began with reading stories aloud.

“We decided to act them out, then we started making little props,” she said. “Each year it gets bigger and bigger. They're so receptive and we're finding they can take on more and more.”

The class puts on a play each year, which is filmed and shown to parents at conferences. The plays have become more than a way to pass the time as teachers have tailored tasks and parts to each student's individual education plan. It's also a way to encourage creativity in students who don't leave their classroom or interact with their peers much during the school day.

“These guys don't have a lot of opportunities to express themselves in a creative way,” Fitzpatrick said.

The plays give them that. Since January, the students and para-educators Crippen and Bobbie Merrill have been creating the sets and rehearsing lines. The play includes three fables, a boy who cried wolf, a crow who wished to be a peacock and a race between a fast hare and a steady tortoise.

Every leaf on the paper trees was colored and cut out by students, tasks that improve dexterity and fine motor skills. The students—with help from adults—made many of the costumes and props, from the cotton ball-covered sheep to the life-sized tortoise.

The sets and props come out each day around noon. Rehearsals require students to concentrate and work as a team. Everyone has to memorize his or her lines.

“We adapt it to what comes more natural to them so they can memorize it better,” Merrill said. “But they're reading. And they're articulating, projecting their voices.”

Most of the students in the class have social or emotional impairments as well, making their ability to act in front of a strange newspaper reporter last week all the more impressive.

“This is their first live audience,” Fitzpatrick said.

Merrill recorded the performance on a digital camera, and it will be played throughout the night at the next parent-teacher conference.

The 13 students in Fitzpatrick's class all agreed they like to do the plays. While some said they want to channel their classroom stage careers onto the silver screen, most of them are just looking forward to showing their parents the recording. One student, Tommy, played the starring role of the tortoise in the “Tortoise and the Hare.”

“We want our parents to be proud of us,” Tommy said.

Becky Thomas can be reached at [email protected].