How Nashville Dismantled Segregated Classrooms for Students With Disabilities

When Debra McAdams stepped into her role leading special education for Nashville schools in 2009, she knew she would immediately face a deeply entrenched system that separated students with disabilities from their peers.

Elementary and middle school students with disabilities were largely taught separately from students without disabilities, often bused past their neighborhood schools—including those attended by their siblings—to regional hubs where educators offered specialized services.

The district, the second largest in Tennessee, operated nearly 200 segregated classrooms, where students with disabilities learned apart from their peers. That included many students with relatively low support needs, such as speech impairments, most districts would place in general education classrooms for the full day. The situation wasn’t just stigmatizing; it conflicted directly with a federal requirement that students with disabilities be educated in the “least restrictive environment.”

It was McAdams’ job to tear down those silos.

Under her leadership, the district committed to a clear principle: students with disabilities would attend their zoned neighborhood schools and participate in core general education classes unless there was a clear educational justification not to.

“All of our students, including those with disabilities, are general education students first, and we should not have separate settings,” McAdams, a 2026 Leader To Learn From honoree, said. “We are all part of one big community, and the earlier that everybody understands that for all of our students, the more accepting everyone is.”

‘A massive mindset shift’

The transformation—part of a broader, multipronged effort to improve education in the 81,000-student Nashville district—required strategic planning, coalition-building, and deep trust-building from McAdams and her team. But the results were measurable: Before the work began in the 2008-2009 school year, about 36% of Nashville students with disabilities spent more than 80% of their time in general education classrooms, a federal metric used to define the least restrictive environment. By the 2023-24 school year, that number had climbed to 76%.

“It was a massive mind shift change,” said Sonya Dobbs, the director of exceptional education student supports for Nashville schools. “It wasn’t easy, and it didn’t just happen. There were a lot of bumps in the road, but we stuck with it because it’s what was best for [the] children.”

A committee of educators, community members, and a Vanderbilt University education professor collaborated on the transformation plan with support from the city’s mayor and business leaders. Students with disabilities who had previously been sent to hub schools would instead attend their neighborhood campuses, starting with kindergartners the first year and adding an additional grade each following year.

The change required a mindset shift from both special education and general education classroom teachers, McAdams said.

“We had general education teachers who had never had a child with autism or a child with an emotional disturbance in their classroom,” she said. “We had to really work to ensure students had access to general education at their new schools.”

To support that shift, the district created targeted professional development on inclusive classroom practices for principals, general education teachers, and special education teachers. Leaders trained staff on co-teaching strategies and classroom management, and they embedded special education in clusters of schools to aid implementation.

Special education leaders also focused on the details. One of the first changes was linguistic: The district adopted “people first” language, referring to students as individuals before referencing their disabilities. Where a teacher might have once said “a disabled child,” they were encouraged to say “a child with disabilities.”

At each school, leaders mapped students’ support needs by cataloging all the services and accommodations outlined in every student’s individualized education program, or IEP. They then ensured that general education classrooms had the resources to meet those needs—like adaptive technologies or help from a paraprofessional—and encouraged collaborative planning among general education, special education, and English-learner teachers.

Leaders also briefed parents about the changes in their children’s IEP meetings, home visits, and larger meetings. While many parents were eager to send their children to neighborhood schools, some needed assurances that their needs would still be met in the new setting.

At the secondary level, the district has partnered with local employers, like the Nashville Zoo, to offer professional learning opportunities and internships for students with disabilities as part of their transition planning, said Megan Cobb, a former special education teacher who now works as a family-engagement specialist with The Arc Tennessee, an organization that helps families navigate the special education system.

McAdams is “very approachable,” Cobb said. “That’s her strength.”

Shoveling the ramp first

Ask people who work with McAdams to describe her approach to education, and many will point to a cartoon she includes in every presentation. It depicts a ramp and a staircase leading to a school, both covered in snow. Students, including one in a wheelchair, wait at the bottom while an adult shovels the stairs.

“If you shovel the ramp first, we can all go in,” the student in the wheelchair says.

“When we do something for students with disabilities, we do something for all students,” Dobbs said. “That’s really her message.”

With that philosophy in mind, the district emphasized universal design for learning practices, which stress giving students options in how they engage with material and demonstrate understanding. For example, a teacher might tape off an area around a desk, allowing a student with ADHD to stand and move without disrupting classmates. Clearly posted lesson goals and classroom expectations can support students with disabilities who value predictability, but they may also help all students stay engaged in their work.

As logistics and classroom practices shifted, educators noticed less formal but equally powerful signs of inclusion. Students with disabilities no longer had separate field trips and separate tables in school lunchrooms, McAdams said.

“I knew we’d made progress when I opened a yearbook, and there was no longer a separate page for the special education classroom,” she said.

A teacher at heart

McAdams earned credibility with educators because she had spent years as a special education teacher in a variety of environments before stepping into leadership, said David Williams, the deputy chief of academics for the district.

After growing up in Long Island, N.Y., McAdams attended Mansfield University in Pennsylvania before working in a lab school for students with disabilities at Lehigh University, co-teaching students by day and going to class at night.

She held roles as a master teacher, a coordinator for students transitioning to college and career, and a behavioral interventionist before moving to Nashville in 1999. There, she taught at a K-8 school in the Nashville district serving students who needed extensive support for behavioral difficulties. In 2006, she helped create a similar school for high school students.

“It’s difficult because you’re dealing with very aggressive behaviors all day long and students who have had major trauma in their life,” McAdams said. “But at the end of the day, those kids knew that we cared about them and that we weren’t giving up on them.”

Today, McAdams leads the district’s largest academic department, which has about 400 employees, including coaches, behavior interventionists, school psychiatrists, and other staff, Williams said. She has deep expertise in special education law, but she’s also still a teacher at heart, he said.

Williams recalled visiting a middle school classroom with McAdams and noticing a student struggling to manage his emotions.

“The first thing Debbie does is sit on the floor next to him and talk to him. She had never met him before, but that part of her nature just turned on,” he said. “She carries that clarity and credibility into interactions with kids, lawyers in remediation, parents, principals.”

A process that never ends

McAdams acknowledges that the district still has work to do.

Like most districts, Nashville struggled to address the needs of students with disabilities during the abrupt shift to remote learning in March 2020. Parents worried about lost instructional time for their children when services like physical therapy couldn’t be delivered in a remote environment and when technology platforms didn’t seem to fit their complex learning needs, said Tiffany Acuff, who chaired the district’s Exceptional Education Families Advisory Council during the pandemic.

Acuff credited McAdams for her willingness to hold online forums to hear concerns from families of children with disabilities, even when there weren’t clear answers. Acuff also ran a private Facebook group for parents, and met with McAdams weekly to share feedback.

Despite significant progress, the district fell short of the state’s least restrictive environment targets last year, McAdams said. In response, educators are auditing IEPs school by school to determine what resources they need to provide in general education classrooms to ensure students with disabilities can spend more time learning with their peers.

It’s a process of continuous improvement that will never end, McAdams said.

“This is not just me,” she said. “This is our department, this is our team, this is our district.”