Jamie Landrigan, an outgoing 18-year-old Concord High School student with Down's Syndrome, has had classes with students without disabilities all her life. Some of her classmates wave when they see her out shopping with her mother. Sometimes they stop to talk in the cafeteria.

But they don't call on the weekends to see if she wants to catch a movie or hang out at the mall. Her mother says this saddens Jamie, who wistfully watched her older brother host sleepovers and stay out late with friends when he was a teenager.

"She just needs someone to get that funny girly feeling with, when you're talking about boys and trying on clothes and getting girlfriends'opinions," said Marilyn Landrigan. "Things like that last a lifetime."

Next fall, Concord High is offering a new class designed to help students like Jamie develop those friendships. Seventy students have already signed up to take the half-year elective course, in which students without disabilities -"typical"students, as special educators prefer to call them - will learn about disabilities and mentor students who have them, both in academic classes and outside of school. The Concord School District has long included students with disabilities in the same classes as their typical classmates. Now, special educators hope the Peer-to-Peer Support Program will help nurture genuine friendships across the disabilities divide.

"I think we've done academic inclusion really, really well," said Kate Daniels, a special education teacher at the high school. "The frontier we still need to break into is that of the feelings level, the friendship level."

Daniels and her colleagues see Brad Niejadlik's social circle as a prototype of the networks the class could help build. Brad, with his strong verbal skills, gregarious nature and keen sense of humor, has developed those friendships organically. But for kids who can't talk or move easily, or who have severe emotional or cognitive impairments, making friends with typical students can be more difficult.

"For them to make friends with other kids, that would be wonderful,"said Pam Davis, an aide who works with students with disabilities, including Niejadlik. "That's what this program is going to help do."

Clay Aiken connection

The school won a $32,000 grant to pay for the new course from the Bubel/Aiken Foundation, a Raleigh, N.C.-based non-profit started by the singer Clay Aiken of American Idolfame.

A few years ago, as a student studying to become a special education teacher, Aiken spent a year caring for a 13-year-old with autism named Mike Bubel. He grew close to Mike's family, and it wasn't long before Diane Bubel, Mike's mother, heard Aiken singing and encouraged him to try out for American Idol. When he became an overnight sensation, Aiken established the foundation, hoping to use his newfound fame to promote "inclusion," or the integration of people with disabilities into the life environment of those without disabilities.

Last year, veteran English teacher and then-assistant principal Joann McGlynn - a rabid Aiken fan who once put her elderly mother in a car in July and drove to Buffalo, N.Y., to see him in concert - suggested to Donna Palley, the high school's special education coordinator, that Concord High help raise money for his foundation. Palley had a different idea: The school should instead try to get money from Aiken for an innovative inclusion program. Its high-profile location in the state's capital, along with its fine academic reputation, made it an ideal laboratory for experimentation.

After some discussion, Palley, McGlynn and Daniels proposed a program that would match student mentors with students with disabilities. Late last year, the school's special education team learned they'd won the grant. Diane Bubel presented the award to the high school in January.

"Concord High School understands that acceptance and interaction with peers is integral to the happiness of all people," she said.

'Genuine relationships'

The project's creators envision a half-year elective course that will include an academic component to teach students about disabilities and about how to work with people who have them in a respectful manner. The course will also include a practical component, where students enrolled in the course will be assigned to work in a regular classroom setting with a student with a disability. This will allow the adult who usually works with the disabled student to assume more of a background position. The hope is that this will make it easier for students to form friendships - and that these friendships will eventually extend beyond the classroom.

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