The UCS program aims to foster sustainable, long-term change and ultimately to create a school climate in which all students feel accepted. This goal is achieved by enlisting students with ID in leadership opportunities in sports, the classroom, and the wider school community. To date, studies
evaluating the UCS program have examined it only in the United States, and these studies show several positive impacts of UCS program activities on students with and without ID. These positive outcomes include a more inclusive school environment for those with ID, easier transitions from primary to secondary school for students with ID, and reduced use of harmful language about students with ID in schools. These findings support the notion that schoolwide interventions such as UCS lead to positive impacts on school culture and can create a supportive social and learning environment.
Overview
In 2019, Special Olympics announced the next phase of global expansion of Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools® (UCS)—one of the largest initiatives that promotes inclusion in education for young people with and without intellectual disabilities (ID)—through the support of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the United Arab Emirates Armed Forces. With the support of this grant, Special Olympics expanded its UCS model to six countries: Argentina, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Romania, and Rwanda. To support this effort, Northwestern University (NU) and Special Olympics formed a partnership to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the implementation and impact of the UCS model expansion on its target population in these six countries. The aim of this report is to discuss the progress that Northwestern and Special Olympics have made between August 5, 2021, and August 1, 2022, the second year of this evaluation. UCS differentiates itself from other models and builds upon existing interventions by operating at various ecological levels and involving multiple stakeholders—students, teachers, and administrators —within multiple school contexts, including classrooms, cafeterias, clubs, and sports (Siperstein, Summerill, Jacobs, & Stokes, 2017, p. 174). The UCS builds upon a whole-school model that relies on three primary elements: Unified Sports, Inclusive Youth Leadership, and Whole School Engagement. In the Unified Sports component, students with and without ID are teammates on a single sports team, training together and competing against other similarly constructed teams. Unified Sports teams have an approximately equal number of participants with and without ID, and they train together through a structured season of activities. In the Inclusive Youth Leadership component, young people with and without ID develop youth leadership skills together through the formation of student-led groups (e.g., clubs) to increase opportunities for social inclusion in the school. In the Whole School Engagement component, student leaders seek to embed inclusion as a schoolwide social norm by engaging the school community in awareness and educational, educational activities on inclusion, such as through school assemblies or other community gatherings.