PENDLETON — Role models are a strong need in the learning process.

Children begin modeling behavior at a very early age and oftentimes they zone in on a friend or peer to emulate. The preschool program in the South Madison Community Schools district is making the most of that tendency.

While the program is designed for children with special needs, enrolled in each class is a boy and a girl without special needs, called a typical peer. As a kind of reverse inclusion program, the teachers are counting on the typical peer to be the role model sought out by the other students.

“These children have gone through a screening process,” said Jenny Spencer, teacher. “They are either 4 or 5 years old and have pretty typical development. They are there to provide a role model for the kids with special needs because so many of them have speech delays or cognitive delays.”

Although the program has been active for seven years, Spencer said that many community members are still unaware of it. Originally the preschool was housed at Maple Ridge, but was moved to Pendleton Elementary three years ago due to space restrictions.

“We serve kids from all the schools but Pendleton is the most central location,” she added. “We do have some that come from Markleville and Ingalls and Summer Lake and we provide bus transportation for those with special needs.”

Not only do the children with special needs benefit from their contact with the typical peers, but the typical peers benefit also — in different ways.

“We work on all the developmental skills that a typical preschool program does, but because the children have such a range of ages and abilities we work a lot in small groups,” Spencer said.

“The biggest advantage for the typical peer is that it really brings out a lot of good character traits, like leadership skills and compassion and patience and caring. At this age children don’t really see differences, so it’s a great program all the way around — it benefits both the special needs children as well as the typical peers,” Spencer said.

A strong believer in her words, Spencer enrolled both of her own children as typical peers.

“My son was a typical peer and now is in the first grade, and he asked me recently why this was called a special needs preschool,” she recounted. “I told him the students have special needs because they learn a little bit differently and they need more help. And he said: ‘I didn’t have any kids with special needs in my class last year.’ He didn’t even see it. Kids are kids to them and I like that.”

The master’s degrees in special needs and early childhood held by Spencer and the other preschool teacher, Marty Elsworth, supplies them with training necessary to not only provide instruction at different levels to accommodate the special needs children, but the typical peers as well.

“We don’t expect everybody to do everything the same way and that includes the lower functioning kids as well as the typically developing kids that are at their level,” Spencer said. “It is really a developmental program that is designed to meet the children’s needs where they’re at. The benefits that come from it are pretty valuable.”

In addition to the developmental advantages posed by the typical peers, social advantages are also realized.

“They develop friendships. That’s one of the goals of the program because sometimes the kids with special needs have challenges with social relationships,” said Spencer. “And that’s why we try to find children that live in our school corporation — the goal is that they go on to elementary school with the children who have special needs, and they will have some of those peer relationships developed and it won’t be so challenging for them.”