Everybody Has a Story: Life is better when you dance

In 1990, I was appointed to be one of four vice principals at a large suburban high school in the Diablo Valley, east of San Francisco. It was my first position as a high school administrator. Vice principals of larger schools do many things: discipline, general supervision of athletics, dances and lunchtime, teacher evaluation, community outreach.

One Friday in the fall of that year, we all learned something that was not part of the official curriculum.

We had a home football game that night, and all the football players were wearing their jerseys. The cheerleaders were in their uniforms. Lots of kids were wearing school colors, blue and white. We were having a good season, and the atmosphere throughout the school was extremely positive. Winning football seasons will do that.

Our principal thought it would be a good idea to have some music playing in the quad at lunchtime, so he rustled up some tapes, hooked a boombox up to the PA system and turned it on. Some of the kids started dancing.

One of those kids had Down syndrome; let’s call him Peter. In the mid-1980s, schools in California (and most other states) had begun integrating kids with special education needs into general education classrooms, as much as possible, according to those kids’ abilities rather than shunting them off to separate classrooms in other locations.

It’s called mainstreaming. Many of these special education kids had personal aides throughout the school day, but not all. The point was to have all kids go to school together, learn about each other and accept each other, no matter what they looked like, what skills they had or what their interests might have been.

When Peter started dancing around the quad, some of the kids without any educational difficulties began to laugh. Peter was moving around erratically, and he was having the time of his life. He was a happy kid, just dancing outside on a sunny day in the quad at his school.

I was standing nearby, but before I could do or say anything, one of the football players stepped up. He wasn’t just any football player. He was one of the team captains. He was tall, strong, smart, good looking. He had all the tools.

This team captain walked out onto the quad and started dancing with Peter. Soon, other football players grabbed some of Peter’s special education classmates and started dancing with them, too. The players didn’t try to mimic their dancing partners’ movements. They all danced their own way, unashamedly, unassumingly and unfettered. They were all having a good time dancing in the quad at their school during lunchtime.

It was a beautiful day, and not just because of the weather. They danced liked nobody was watching.

The laughter stopped. Soon, more kids danced. Other kids walked away. The bell finally rang for the end of lunchtime, and everyone began to filter back to class for some new lessons, no doubt different than the one they just had.

I have forgotten if we won the game that night, and I don’t know what happened to that team captain. I don’t know if he was all-league or played in college somewhere after high school. But whatever he did, wherever he is, I do know that he was, and is, a starter on the All-Human Team. And so’s Peter.

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