 So who are the children with special support needs? You're working with them. You see these kids every day. Oh, by the way, I should mention to you that your PowerPoint includes most, but not all, of the slides that you're going to see. So most of the text is there, not necessarily all of the photos. Just in case you're busy looking through and wondering, well, where's that? Don't expect every single one of them. And let me just find my place as well. OK, so the kids are kids like Sean. You've worked with these children. They live in your neighborhoods. You may have family members. You may have close friends who've experienced some of these kinds of conditions. They may have disabilities. They may have emotional challenges. There may be family situations that are problematic. As an example, in Winnipeg, where I'm from, recently, we've had many, many children moving into Winnipeg who've left war-torn countries in Africa. We're seeing some very extreme behaviors being presented by some of the children. We understand their family situation as such that what have these kids experienced in their young lives? And no wonder, we're seeing some kids being a little bit out of sorts, if I can say it that way, when they come into our early learning or early learning classrooms. So these kids are all around us. And these children all require something more from us. The typical classroom is the foundation for what we do. But then they require our attitudes to be there. They require us to be thinking about, what does this child need to be successful? They need staff like Sean's who don't say you can't, but instead say you can. Sadly, there's not as many people out there in this world with that positive attitude that we might wish there were. So headline news, I just want to give you an assortment of some of the stuff that I've read about in the papers over the last few years. First off, let's say 2006, I think that says, a mass grave was dug up in Germany. They found it by accident when they were doing some building, planning to put up a condo development. And they found in this grave skeletons of at least 51 people. And they could tell from the skeletons a number of them were children, 22 of them were children. And they could tell from their bone structure that many of those were children with physical and mental disabilities, kids with Down syndrome, kids with cerebral palsy. So when we think about what kind of attitudes were in place in Nazi Germany, clearly that's the type of attitude we don't want to see here in Canada, and we've come a long way since. What else? Recently, in a science journal, I read an article about some fossils that were dug up, a grave of fossils that go back half a million years. There's music coming out. OK, I don't know, thank you. Maybe I'm supposed to sing now or something. Give me a mic, you don't know what might happen. All right, so yeah, they dug up this grave that had evidence there of a child with a physical disability who was clearly part of the family group. Now what happened to them? Did they get stuck in the tar sands? Who knows what happened? But the fact is that they were able to find this grave that showed half a million years ago children with disabilities were being cared for by their family group. I just rejoiced in that one. I thought positive attitude up, right? It's not a new thing, although sometimes we've had sketchy times where we've been more inclusive or less inclusive, but how wonderful that back then that child was cared for in such a wonderful way. An unhappy headline. This happened right in my hometown, Winnipeg. It hit the front page of the Globe and Mail and media across the country carried the story. Some children pushed a child with a physical disability into a shed, locked the door and set it on fire. I want to say to you, I want to believe that these were kids that hadn't gone to an inclusive early learning program that hadn't experienced inclusion firsthand. I don't know the motivations, what went on there, but that kind of bullying, that kind of rejection of the other negative attitude, right? That's the kind of attitude we don't want our children growing up with. And one more headline. This one appeared in a tiny little community newspaper in BC. The Meadow, what's it called, Maple Ridge Pit Meadow's Times. And it was a story that was told during Community Living Month, the month of October. And a reporter wrote a first person story about her own daughters who at that time were in high school. And these girls were coming home from their high school really offended by the way one of their peers was being treated by the teachers in this school. The teachers were very patronizing. The teachers treated this student as though the student had no intellect at all, although that was clearly not the case. And the daughters of the journalist were so angered by what happened. Why? The journalist mom told the story of her own daughter's early years experience where they attended the Magic Puddle Play School and where they had learned firsthand about inclusion. And they carried that vision with them. And when they were high schoolers, they were offended on behalf of one of their peers by the inequitable way their peer was being treated. Why is this an important story? Well, inclusion benefits not only children with special support needs, but also typically developing children because the time that we develop our attitudes and values is when we're very young. And unless we experience some life-changing experience like something major happens to us, then probably the attitudes that formed when we were children are the same attitudes that we carry with us for life. These two daughters are advocates for inclusion because of their early childhood experience. So positive attitude up. The thing that really gets me is those kind of headlines never appear on the front page of the Globe and Mail. It's just the sad and scary stories that hit the big news. But the day-to-day stories, the stories of what we do, the work we're engaged in, the learning that happens for our children, we are the ones that have to tell those stories. We're the ones that need to make them transparent to others. We need to help other people see the value of what it is that we do and why we're so committed to inclusion. And I hope that during today you'll have many opportunities to tell your story, not only during the small table conversations, but over the coffee breaks, the lunches, and in the months to come. Keep telling those stories. Okay, so the federal government did a poll a couple of years ago. They were trying to find out about what do average Canadians know about disabilities. And I'm just gonna give you a few highlights of this, but you may be interested in looking for the full study and the name of it is in your PowerPoint. Okay, so they found that many people have had some degree of experience with disability. They know somebody, but typically they think about people with a physical disability. They're far less likely to talk about somebody with a cognitive or developmental type of delay. So the public has some very general understanding of disability, but perhaps not the full picture. And so I just wanna pause for a moment to give you a chance to get to know the people at your own small tables, both here in Edmonton and across the province. And we're gonna just ask you to introduce yourself and your Red Mitton facilitators will help a little bit with this to just think about your own personal experience with disability. Do you know somebody, a child or an adult, and have you ever talked about that disability directly with that person or perhaps in the case of a child with the family members? So we'll give you like about five minutes or six minutes to do that. There won't be a reporting back on this one, although we will have opportunities to report back on some of our other discussions. Okay, so about five or six minutes to get to know each other and discuss this question, please.