Junior Alex Yang began volunteering with Friendship Circle, a program that pairs teen volunteers with neurodiverse children to participate in activities, through a two-week summer program in 2024. Since then, she has continued to volunteer with this organization every Thursday during the school year and 5 days per week during the summer.

Yang decided to join Friendship Circle after her history teacher assigned her and a partner to work on a project researching Gunn’s policy regarding students with special needs. They learned about the program by talking to various administrators and coming up with ways to improve it through surveys sent out to teachers. Although they weren’t able to come up with long-lasting solutions for Gunn’s policy on students with special needs, Yang did gain knowledge about the community and policies regarding their education.

“I had originally been interested in the topic of (helping the community) because I noticed a lot of the neurodiverse kids in my history class were being made fun of by the other kids in the class,” she said. “I was interested in seeing what could be done to mitigate that (problem, which) got me interested in working with members of the neurodiverse community.”

Throughout Yang’s time at Friendship Circle, she not only gained knowledge and experience, but she gained something even more valuable — a special connection with one of the camp attendees.

“I was paired up with a five-year-old girl, and she’s super cute,” she said. “She’s energetic, but she’s also nonverbal.

(Despite this barrier), she is able to communicate in other ways. I had so much fun working with her. She really loves to give high-fives — that’s her favorite part (of seeing me).”

Having the opportunity to create and nurture these
bonds with special needs students is one of the reasons Yang joined the program in the first place. However, her job also comes with challenges.

“Since I have been mostly working with (a five-year-old
nonverbal) girl, and she doesn’t speak, I’d say the hardest part is trying to understand what she wants without her verbally telling me,” she said.

Regardless, Yang loves her volunteering job. Although most of her time was spent with the five-year-old girl, she has since branched out and worked with different kids every week.

“I’m really big on working with kids, and I love being with kids,” she said. “It’s fun getting to know their different personalities, and it’s been really interesting to get a new perspective on a (diverse) group of kids.”

From guiding aides to adjusting every lesson to best support each student, Educational Specialist Natalia Hawthorne puts tremendous amounts of effort into helping every student she works with.

She spends time preparing individualized materials for each student, managing aides, communicating with parents and teachers and discussing Individualized Education Plans with parents to determine what their child needs.

“We typically balance having IEP meetings with parents and having meetings with teachers,” she said.“ We are also collaborating with other educators and support providers, like specialists that do speech and occupational therapy and the adaptive P.E. teacher.
We’re communicating with a lot of people.”

Hawthorne’s work requires her to aid each student based on their specific accommodation needs.

“If I have, let’s say, six kids in a class, that’s six different
curriculums, because there’s six different sets of needs,” she said. “For example, I have a student with visual impairment. So I’m taking the work that might be designed for the rest of the class and I adapt the materials digitally so that it aligns with his visual impairment needs.”

One of the crucial parts of her work is communicating. She prioritizes talking with the other special education teachers, the instructional aides, and, of course, the students.

“(This work) is really about making sure everybody’s on the same page,” she said. “(We need to make sure) that we’re all able to communicate with each other. I work really well with the other teacher that has the same job as I do, and we team up and support each other on everything. I see improvement in how the entire team is working with each other and in the ways that we are communicating. (For example), we have created text groups for individual kids.”

She believes the most difficult part of her job is when students struggle to express what they need or how
they are feeling. Even though the job comes with its challenges, Hawthorne has a deep love for the kids.

“I love their joy, love that they are authentically themselves and don’t feel the need to impress or be a certain way for other people,” she said. “They’re just truly authentic.”

When she’s teaching a nonverbal student to spell out his thoughts by pointing to letters, instructional aide Tatum Angotti embodies a guiding hand. Last year, Angotti helped the student use the letter board to write a 1.5-page letter that explained his needs and experiences at school.

“It’s a fulfilling moment to see him (write the letter) and have him realize that he has a say in his education and how he wants to learn and experience at school,” Angotti said. “He felt like (people around him) would listen to autism experts more than they would listen to him about his actual experience.”

As a second-year aide in Gunn’s Extensive Support Needs class, Angotti accompanies students to classes and assists them in achieving their Individualized Education Program goals. Her work continues in room K-12, where she helps her students in vocational training, body regulation and real-life application of academic skills.

“The more we model (for them) and they see their needs being met, it inspires some level of independence in them, and that’s the goal,” she said. “We don’t want them to be reliant on other people, and they don’t want to be reliant on other people either.”

Her interest in understanding behavior catalyzed in a less expected place: criminal psychology. Trying to get into the field, she worked as a behavior therapist, which led her to volunteer with disabled youth, including those who were hearing-impaired and wheelchair-bound. Combined, these experiences shifted Angotti’s career goals toward neurodivergent behavior.

“I feel like the more that I worked with kids on the spectrum, the more I realized that all behavior is a form of communication,” she said. “It might be (atypical) to an outsider, but it’s effectively them trying to communicate something that they don’t have the ability to with their words.”

Before starting her paraeducator journey, Angotti recognized the field’s perennial issue of high turnover rates, in which aides report feeling underpaid and overworked. While Angotti does not express feeling this way herself, she acknowledges the adaptability and empathy required to navigate the hurdles of the career.

“(Many) on the spectrum rely on their most comfortable routine, so something challenging is if routines are messed up (from late-start Mondays, field trips or special schedules),” she said. “Parent communication helps to anticipate triggers that could affect the behavior, but unpredictability can be tough.”

While the challenges of the job are undeniable, they are eclipsed by a broader mosaic of work that is deeply fulfilling. In this way, Angotti learns from her students, leads them to self-advocacy and plays a hand that leads without holding too tight.

“Their minds are alive, and they’re so smart,” she said. “In their core, they’re just regular high school kids (who have) crushes, want to date, want to go to the dances and all that stuff. It’s cool to see that and help bring it out of them.”