During Superflex last Wednesday, the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School’s (MVRHS) Best Buddies club hosted an open meeting in the library for a Disability Etiquette and Awareness training. During the near hour-long training session, students and club advisors engaged in conversations and group activities, and shared experiences to learn about building a stronger and more inclusive community.
The Best Buddies club is part of a global organization that fosters inclusion for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The training was provided by the Best Buddies of Massachusetts and Rhode Island and was led by Mariam Antoine, the program manager for the South Shore and Cape Cod.
The initiative to bring the training to the school came from senior club members who attended the Best Buddies leadership conference in Indiana this past summer.
“I’ve been in Best Buddies since my freshman year, but at the leadership conference they were offering to visit and speak to schools. You just had to sign up for it,” said senior Katie Becker. “It just stuck out to us as something that was definitely in need of doing in our school.”
Throughout the training, students were given the opportunity to share their experiences and reflect on the importance of language as a tool for inclusion in ways that felt personal and meaningful.
“So it started with us reflecting on our friendships and our relationships or [with] anybody in our lives that has IDD,” Katie said. “Often, we don’t know how to address somebody in a non-hurtful way or how to talk to somebody without maybe babying them. We discussed how to interact with people better and have better relationships with friends.”
MVRHS librarian and Best Buddies club advisor Kevin McGrath said that students watched a couple of eye-opening videos from the perspective of people with disabilities about their experiences.
Many students had a shared takeaway about using person-first language, which is a type of phrasing that places an emphasis on the person instead of their disability. The idea is to name the person before any reference to their disability.
Senior Taz Strom participated in the training. He said, “It’s important to think about people for who they are, and not what they are.”
Mr. McGrath recalled a moment when Ethan Burr, a student with IDD, shared his feelings with the group. “[He] said, ‘You guys are all my best friends’ to everybody. He just kind of just blurted it out. It was kind of a neat moment,” said Mr. McGrath.
Reflecting on the training and Best Buddies’ overall mission, Ms. Antoine noted that bringing Best Buddies initiatives like this training to MVRHS shows how the program can expand to new places and continue to engage high school students in meaningful ways.
“It helps us show everybody else how pervasive the mission of Best Buddies is. [To be able to say] ‘Hey, it reached the Island’ — in that sense it’s really powerful. I love that this program is out here wanting to expand,” she said.
Taz said he valued how the training can help in future instances of people misusing language correlated with people with IDD. He said, “I think it can help me stand up and act when I see something like that happening and be more aware of how my actions might affect others, especially when it comes to using certain words.”
