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Mostly Cloudy Autism Awareness Month at Parkway
If you step foot into Parkway Elementary School you’ll find the hallway walls covered in infinity signs each decorated in a unique way. Each one decorated by a Parkway student, they hang on the walls of the school to represent Autism Awareness Month, celebrated in the month of April.
Infinity signs replace the typical autism charity Autism Speaks puzzle piece to promote inclusivity and neurodiversity, said Amelia Garcia, principal of Parkway Elementary School. This is Garcia’s first year as principal of Parkway and previously she had been an assistant principal at Barnum Woods Elementary School and Bowling Green Elementary School. “This year coming into Parkway one of my building level goals is inclusivity,” she said.
Toni Tortora, one of the parents who helped put up the infinity signs with her daughter Gwendolyn, a first-grader at Parkway, said that using the infinity symbol instead of the puzzle piece makes the campaign more about acceptance. “For the last few years, autism acceptance is now what we’re focusing on,” she said. “Because we’re at the stage of neurodiversity, where awareness should be there and people should understand that autistic people live in our community.”
The roughly 600 students decorated their infinity symbols the week of March 28 and members of the PTA, parents and their children helped put them all around the main hallway of the school the night of March 31, just in time for the start of Autism Awareness Month, Katie Nehrebecki, a member of the PTA said.
“I had reached out to Ms. Garcia to ask her if we can do something bigger for autism awareness,” Nehrebecki said. “She asked me if I had read her mind because she had already planned on doing something.” In the past, the autism awareness campaign for the school really just consisted of wearing a blue shirt on one Friday.
Nehrebecki said that she has known Garcia since she was an assistant principal in Bowling Green because her son Ricky, 14, has autism and all students with special needs in East Meadow go to Bowling Green. But now that Garcia is the principal of Parkway and Nehrebecki’s two daughters have gone through Parkway, Eva, 11 who now goes to Woodland Middle School and Layni, a second grader at Parkway, she wanted to organize a campaign to bring more awareness to autism.
“What this little campaign did was make 600 more kids more aware,” Nehrebecki said. “You have awareness, then you get acceptance. You can’t have one without the other so by learning about it, you’re making 600 more people kinder and more tolerant.”
Along with the infinity signs, the school had plenty of other activities that helped students learn about autism. Each kid was asked to bring in $1 to collect and donate to the Nassau Suffolk Autism Society of America, which donates all of its proceeds directly to families with autism and in total, the school collected about $500.
Every morning there are school announcements that contain one fact about autism to help the children learn more about it. A designated school committee made Google Classroom slides that consisted of information and videos about autism. Nehrebecki even donated some books about autism that she got from NSASA that are being read in classrooms.
“I just feel it’s extremely important for all my students to feel special and to feel part of the community,” Garica said. “More importantly, I just feel that we should expose our children to differences and show them how to be accepting and think about it like our students are our future. And acceptance can just lead to just such greater support everywhere.”
