Cathi Davis on Creating Schools Where Every Learner Belongs ~ 1302

Cathi Davis
You are a learner, you are a leader, you belong here. And I really feel like all three of those things go together. Our kids don’t get to redo any of the minutes of their educational journey. I feel like our work and our opportunity is to say we have 188 days every single school year to give our students the maximum opportunity to be in community, to be seen and valued for what they bring to community.

Tim Villegas
Hello friends. Welcome back to Think Inclusive: Real Conversations about building schools where every learner belongs. I’m your host, Tim Villegas. Today’s episode is about purposefully designing for belonging, elevating student voice, and creating the adult collaboration that makes inclusive practices sustainable.

I am joined by Cathi Davis, principal of Ruby Bridges Elementary School in Woodinville, Washington and the 2025 Washington State Principal of the Year. She and her team opened a school on a bold promise: we thought of you when we made this place. That mindset now shows up in everything from how schedules are built to how kids communicate, to who’s waiting for whom at the birthday party snack table.

Here’s what we’re gonna talk about: why belonging must be designed and not declared, and why “you are a learner, a leader, and you belong here” is one vision, not just three options. How leaders protect co-planning time, model vulnerability, and build collective efficacy. The stories show what’s possible when belonging comes first.

Now, before we meet our guest, a quick word from our sponsor. This season of Think Inclusive is brought to you by IXL. IXL is a fantastic all-in-one platform designed for K–12 education. It helps boost student achievement, empowers teachers, and tracks progress seamlessly. Imagine having a tool that simplifies what usually requires dozens of different resources. Well, that’s IXL. As students practice, IXL adapts to their individual needs, ensuring they’re both supported and challenged. Plus, every learner receives a personalized learning plan to effectively address any knowledge gaps. Learn more at ixl.com/inclusive. That’s ixl.com/inclusive.

All right. After a quick break, it’s time to think inclusive with Cathi Davis. Catch you on the other side.

Tim Villegas
Cathi Davis, welcome to the Think Inclusive Podcast.

Cathi Davis
Thank you, Tim. It’s wonderful to be here. I listen all the time to this podcast, so it’s a joy to get to be a part of the conversation with you today.

Tim Villegas
I really appreciate it. I’ve been doing this for around 13 years, so it’s wild.

Cathi Davis
That’s the same amount of time I’ve been a principal. And that feels wild too. Sometimes it feels like I just started and sometimes it feels like, wow, this has been a while that I’ve been in this. And so sometimes you don’t realize how fast time flies.

Tim Villegas
Well, Cathi, it’s a pleasure to have you on, and I just want to say congratulations right off the bat for winning—I hope I’m getting this right—the Washington State Principal of the Year. Is that right?

Cathi Davis
Yes. That was a surprising joy of 2025 that I found out about in March. Came right at that moment where you needed the universe to say, keep going. So thank you. A real honor.

Tim Villegas
Yeah, yeah. And I’m sure that you are using your platform to spread ideas about inclusion and inclusive education. So let’s start off with something that I’ve heard you say many times from our conversations and then visiting Ruby Bridges. You’ve said about Ruby Bridges that “we thought of you when we made this place.” How did that belief shape the design and culture of Ruby Bridges from the very beginning?

Cathi Davis
Sure. So what’s interesting about that statement is that a lot of the conversations I have with folks about our school and building our school tend to start out about construction and wow, this is this really beautiful building. The idea of “we thought of you when we made this place” really came about before the school building was completed. And it was around a year prior when I started having conversations with families who would be potentially moving into our school community because we were built as a school that was going to help with just re-boundary assignments so that overcrowding would be dealt with in our school district.

And so we kind of knew where students would be coming from—an awesome chance to go out and just talk to families, talk to shareholders in our community. And I asked two questions over and over again: What do you hope for in this new school? What are you worried about? And over and over again, I felt like what people kept coming back to was this idea that they wanted in some way to feel like the school was for them, that they had been a part of what was intended in community.

When we’re thinking about designing the school, I wanted us to be putting right in the front of mind that students would walk into any part of the school and think that the place that we were defining on a given day was really built with intention around welcoming them, thinking ahead of time about them being essential and not an afterthought or an addition to what we were creating.

And so there’s just so many ways that I think that schools do that work of telling a story to a student that the place was intended for them, that it really couldn’t continue or be the same lesson or the same classroom community, or the same track team if we didn’t have you here. And so that’s a lot of how we’ve tried to build out culture, just constantly asking the question: does this decision, does the furniture that we thought about, does the lesson, does all of it really say you were on our mind when we were designing and planning?

I think that one of the powerful examples that I love is that a lot of our events—both in-school events and welcome events—really hinge on thinking about all of the people who will join us at those events and how powerful it’s been for a parent to say, wow, when I come to an event and there are supports in place that already assumed that there would be a lot of variation in how kids might participate or what kinds of things kids might enjoy, that makes me feel like I don’t need to ask permission to be here, which is really different from what I’ve experienced in other circumstances.

So I hope that “we thought of you when we made this place” is something that lives not as a mindset in designing spaces, but more thinking about the fact that we are always designing spaces. Like every day we redesign what school means and how school operates for the people that are in any given community.

Tim Villegas
Yeah. It’s like you’re co-creating, right?

Cathi Davis
Exactly.

Tim Villegas
Yeah. Yes. That is such a common theme among people who are thinking inclusively, this idea of co-creation and then also facilitating belonging.

Tim Villegas
And so that brings me to another thing that I’ve heard you say: “You belong here.” This idea of belonging is just baked in. It’s like stitched into the culture and everything you’re doing at Ruby Bridges. That must be challenging. I don’t know—let me ask you, is that challenging? Because when we’re thinking about belonging, we like this idea of, okay, everyone that’s here, we’re co-creating with everyone. But in practice, to me, that seems like it would really be challenging to do that all the time. So what’s that experience like?

Cathi Davis
I think you’re making a really important point about the idea of belonging first. I’ve been in teaching roles or admin roles for 25 years. I don’t think I’ve ever really heard anyone say they don’t want people to feel like they belong. There’s not a lot of overt “you don’t belong here” being talked about in a lot of the conversations that happen at schools.

I feel like more and more there’s a lot of statements of “you belong here,” especially out here in Washington state. The idea of belonging comes up in a lot of conversations, so I think it’s easy to say “you belong here.” And then when we step back and interrogate that a little bit, what often is really happening is: you belong here at lunchtime. Or you belong here if you can be quiet. You belong here if you have enough skills to engage in this way in a particular community.

I also think that “you belong here except for these circumstances” is sort of built into a lot of school systems as well. And so belonging becomes really a lot of different things to a lot of different people and tends to be really superficial.

When we were setting up our vision statement for the school, there are three parts to it: you are a learner, you are a leader, you belong here. And I really feel like all three of those things go together because belonging in and of itself—how can I belong here if I don’t have the opportunity to actually engage in learning here? How can I belong here if it’s set up that there will always be a power dynamic where one of us gets to decide whether my belonging can happen or not, or whether I can even be in this space, let alone be a leader?

So when our team put those three statements together, it was really purposeful to say that every single person needs to be able to affirm: yes, I can engage in learning; yes, I can engage in leadership; and through that I can belong and have value in community.

Trying to make that happen is co-construction like we’ve been saying. We’re reaffirming it and checking whether it’s true over here. Is it true when we plan our instruction that we actually are planning for all of the students and thinking about teaching the third graders, not the third grade curriculum specifically? Is it true that this really cool assembly that we think is important for all students is actually set up so all students can be present in that assembly and engage in a way that feels fulfilling to them?

We want that to be our heartbeat as a school community. We want our students to be able to push back and say, this doesn’t feel like belonging. Belonging feels different to me. So there’s a lot of work to try to engage student voice to ask the question: is this true? Is this a space where students belong if they’re not able to answer yes, I can see myself in this?

The other really important piece with that for our school team has been that we show students and families belonging also by modeling that in the work we do together as adults. If there are systems set up in our school where certain adults have more voice or leadership or can exert more on the system itself than others—if paraeducators are in positions where they have no voice toward engaging in instructional planning or their ideas are not valued at the same equivalent value as a classroom teacher or a related service provider—well, we’re telling those people they don’t belong here. And that is going to play out in different ways in how they engage with students, but also in how they engage with each other. And it’s really not going to allow us to work at maximum capacity for the kids that we serve.

Tim Villegas
I’m really glad you brought up student voice and I think that is an often overlooked aspect of belonging. I think at times as adults we’re like, we’re going to create this inclusive space and then we don’t ask any questions about the people who are gonna be in the space. So it’s, again, it’s that whole idea of co-creation. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about that and how that works.

I’d like to explore what collaboration between adults looks like. You mentioned it just a little bit in your comments before, but in inclusive schools—and we see this over and over again in the partners that we have and then just speaking with educators across the country—in the most inclusive schools, general and special education teachers have time to collaborate. So what does that look like at Ruby Bridges and how do you foster that collaboration?

Cathi Davis
Definitely intentionally. The first thing that I would say about that, just thinking about my own positionality, is I think it is so important for school leaders to take responsibility for what our role is in creating systems of collaboration or holding space for collaboration for the staff that we work with.

If I, as a principal, want my team to be able to work together, I have to demonstrate commitment to that in how I schedule the master schedule for the school and how I schedule staff and how I organize every aspect of what’s happening at school. So I just think that it’s really important as a principal: if you want collaboration to happen and to the ends of enacting inclusive practices, as a principal I have to know my students and my student community really well, and my staff and their strengths really well, so that I am thinking from an asset frame of how do I maximize all of the expertise that exists in my school? Where are those places where I can bring people together with the talents and expertise that they have so that they can work together, but also so that they can grow together?

Cathi Davis
One of the big pieces for us is really this idea that all of our students belong to all of us, and that our work is really about finding success pathways for all of the students. So really divesting ourselves of this idea that individual teachers are solely responsible for their classroom and their set of students. That mindset sets up a competitive, individualistic model for teaching practice, which I think is really harmful for building capacity.

In our school, we hold on to a collaboration time every single week. We’ve made mutual commitments around having at least one meeting that happens where I’ve organized the school master schedule so that I’ve freed up special education teachers to be in planning meetings with classroom teachers and related service providers.

The other piece is that if this is our mission work, then we have to put all of our time into it. So I focus on our staff meeting times that we do have allocated to us to create collaborative space. There are lots of things we could talk about in person, but if it’s not in service to collaboration around inclusionary practices, then we’re not doing it in our meetings. I’ll send you an email or meet with you separately for other things.

I also think helping us to really build collective efficacy has been a part of my work. When people work separately, they tend to try to build their skills so that their individual toolkit will really be enough to serve whatever needs are in front of them. When people work collaboratively, they start to orient themselves toward who else might know about this, or how much would I need to know about this to work independently, or who could I partner with so that I could do this better?

That’s an unlearning of some of the practices that exist in schools and maybe just that rugged, individualistic mindset: “I have to know everything and be really successful.” Over the last five years we started out where staff were saying things like, “Wow, I really don’t know enough about assistive technology to do this work.” And then it became, “How much would I need to know in order to start doing this work?” And then realizing that if people work alongside each other for a small period of time, they organically learn from each other, and then the next time they’re working, they might not need someone to stand alongside them.

So really just trying to build on that idea that every time we collaborate together, we can ask and be vulnerable and take that risk to say we don’t know. And it won’t mean that we don’t do the thing; it just means that we might be more open to finding out about someone else’s idea about how to do the thing.

As a principal, I can support that by allowing for risk-taking and failure to happen. It’s messy work. It doesn’t have to be perfect. And what we also know is that in exclusionary spaces, it’s not perfect either. Sometimes what happens is in places where we’re trying to enact inclusive school practices, we somehow get ourselves into this mindset that someplace over there things are happening really well and perfectly, and that’s our excuse not to try to move forward, when in reality it’s not perfect anywhere. And that shouldn’t be getting in the way of us trying to do better for kids in inclusive settings.

Tim Villegas
“It’s not perfect anywhere.” That’s great. I like that. What I’ve found too about collaboration, when you’re really collaborative, is you rely on other people. You do. And that is a scary thing to do because people will let you down. Inevitably, people are imperfect. Spaces are imperfect and people are imperfect. But it’s kind of this beautiful, messy thing because even in those imperfections, trust can be built over time, especially if we do actually rely on each other. So that’s so important that you’re providing that space for collaboration for your staff.

Cathi Davis
I think the messiness too—over the last five years of our school, just continuing to try to build the vision, make it happen, see what happens—there’s been this energy that comes from creation and building organically. I think that’s been a part of that engine of doing the work. There is something so incredible about seeing an idea come to fruition in a particular place and seeing it unlock something for a student.

A lot of us in education—that’s part of why we got into the work. It is powerful when you see a child communicate for the first time or read for the first time. Just like as a parent, it was powerful the first time that my child stood up. Those are moments that really create energy for the next thing, even when it’s hard.

So I think we need messiness and risk for innovation and action to happen. And that’s actually a big part of the engine of what makes school and school communities thrive when we step back and think about it. I like seeing how my staff has evolved in their expertise and can own their learning and their growth, and that energizes me and my work. There’s just a lot of that reciprocal, “Wow, look at how we’re not the same as we were before. And isn’t that really incredible?”

Tim Villegas
Yeah. That self-reflection or that reflection just within the group really reinforces what you’re doing. That’s powerful.

After a quick break, we’re going to get into some student stories and why Ruby Bridges treats belonging as the starting point for every learner.

Tim Villegas
Here’s the part where I tell you a little bit about the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education. MCIE partners with educators and school systems to promote authentic inclusion, foster change, and support the implementation of inclusive practices—whether it’s district-wide transformation, customized learner planning, or professional learning and coaching. MCIE walks alongside educators every step of the way, and here’s the best part: our work begins with a conversation. So are you ready to have a conversation? Are you ready to create schools where every learner belongs? Visit mcie.org and get in touch and start that conversation today.

I’d love to talk about students, and I’m wondering if you have some students that are top of mind and any stories about the impact that a fully inclusive school has on particular learners. What’s on top of mind for you when I ask you that?

Cathi Davis
Yeah, I think a lot of students come to mind. One of the things I would say before sharing specific to students who might not generally get an opportunity to be in general education like they do at our school is that one of the most powerful transformations that I have seen is in students who now know who they were missing in their classrooms and who have a more expansive view of what community is.

Our school has been a part of a project to create a documentary about the work that’s happening at the school, which is going to come out next year. We’ve been doing some screenings, and one of our students who speaks in the film reflected back to his parent and she shared with me the other day that he was sharing that he is proud to be a part of our school because he knows that his school represents community. And he also said, “I have learned so much from everyone that I work with at school,” and named a particular student who would have been excluded in a different school dynamic and said, “He’s taught me about this. He’s taught me about that.”

Then he said, “Can you imagine if we needed someone who knew a lot about this topic? Wouldn’t we want to be able to ask him to tell us about that or to be an expert? Wouldn’t it be great if we just could be seen for the things that we have as value?”

So I think about that coming from fourth and fifth graders already processing like, hey, sometimes the system’s not set up to really magnify our strengths or see that. And I’m a part of something where that does matter. And now I know someone who’s an expert on a topic because it’s what they care about and they’ve had space to explain that or share that. So I think that that’s really powerful and that matters.

Ultimately what’s going to matter for everything that’s going on in the world is that our kids have a more expansive idea of what community is and can help enact it long after I’m out of the principalship and out of schools.

On the other side of that is knowing that I have students over the last couple of years who have had opportunities to really unlock communication in ways that I never was able to support in places that I was a principal or teacher in before that were much more exclusionary. We’ve seen how when students are given access to each other, peer-to-peer communication grows so much.

I have students who, when they started at our school, maybe they were not confident in using AAC devices or weren’t even confident really in what they could trust from the adults and the students that were working alongside them and maybe were really dysregulated initially in classrooms. I’ve watched them learn classroom routines and make connections with peers and develop levels of independence in coming into class and sharing in class and really taking up space.

I think that that’s super important because I want all of my students to feel like they have a space where they can make demands on their community and share their talents.

I also think our learning data at our school has been so incredibly powerful in terms of thinking about students getting reading, writing, and math skills. Our students having multiple modes to engage in learning and instruction has meant that all students are constantly being able to access tools that they might need to grow in their learner capacity.

Our students who come from different places and have different home and heart languages than English are showing just huge gains in what they can show in terms of what they know and also their communication.

The other side of this too is about friendship, right? Our students are known and needed in their classrooms, and so what I see is students who are inviting each other to play dates and birthday parties. I was at a birthday party just after school got out, and one of the students was looking for another student in the class who hadn’t arrived yet. She said, “I’m waiting for him to get here because he really likes this particular snack, and I made sure that my mom got it because I know he really likes the snack.”

I was thinking about that. There are kids sitting in other communities who are not invited to a birthday party at all. There are certainly kids who, if they are invited to a birthday party, don’t have friendships that are rich enough to identify the snack that they like and think through all of the parts of what connection really means for friendship.

That kind of gain too is more powerful than any individual reading lesson that happened over the course of kindergarten for those two students. But it also sets a groundwork for everything that comes after that because there’s that need that all of us have to be connected as well as to be learning. And if you don’t have that connection, then you can’t make the learning happen either for kids.

Tim Villegas
That—I love that example. And that wouldn’t even be an example if the learner wasn’t in that class.

Cathi Davis
Right? You have to have presence.

Cathi Davis
When we were opening this school, I can remember a lot of the conversation from different people. Two big things really stood out, which I think are connected to this. One was parents said, “I’ve been told that general education isn’t safe for my child.” I can remember feeling just this pit in my stomach thinking about what it would mean not only as a parent, but just really thinking about as a principal.

What does it mean if I’m willing to sit down at a table and tell a parent that their child is not safe in a portion of my school? And to just leave it there—to just make that an okay space for my school culture or to name that as just a part of what reality is instead of something that I’m trying to disrupt or change?

I’ve wanted to know in what I’m seeing between students and what I’m hearing from families that their children all feel safe and welcome in the spaces that they’re in. At the same time, I’m realizing that along the way, so much of that exclusion has really created systems where we assign adults to help separate in the act of supporting instead of create space for friendship and connection.

The birthday example for me is like—the birthday party is someone needs to want me there and then be looking for when I arrive. I want school to be that too. I want school to be someone is looking for me to get off the bus and will notice if I don’t and will wonder if I’m sick or on vacation or what story I might have to tell when I return. And I want that to be someone’s classmate, not an adult. I want that to be the friend that they might have 10 years from now who will have a shared experience of kindergarten or third grade or fifth grade. That is different and it’s important. And I think that’s something that we’ve been doing at Ruby Bridges and watching happen and realizing that kids have the capacity to do and have always had the capacity to do.

Tim Villegas
What about for—in some schools that we work with, and even inclusive schools, there are members of the staff that have a hard time or are working through this idea that all students belong in general education. I’m not asking for you to throw any of your staff under the bus here, but I’m wondering how do you foster that mindset in your staff? And maybe we can turn it around and have you give advice to principals because I think what happens is principals or school leaders, they want their schools to be inclusive and there are some barriers. One of the barriers is veteran teachers that have been brought up in this idea that there are separate spaces for certain kids.

This child is autistic or has autism; therefore they should be supported in an autism program or class. This student has an intellectual disability; well, they would be best served in an intellectual disabilities classroom. And if they can’t keep up or if they can’t do certain things, if they can’t sit still, then they shouldn’t be in general education. So I’m wondering if you could frame that for a listener who is going, this sounds really great, I really want to move forward with this, but how do I get past having those conversations with the staff who have that mindset?

Cathi Davis
That’s the big piece of it, right? First, I think you have to be able to be honest and transparent, and you have to be able to be vulnerable and accountable. I have to, as a leader—and I think all folks that are in educational leadership—if we want to support change to happen in our schools or in our school systems, then we have to be able to be accountable for where we haven’t done the thing that way before.

If I, as a leader, am talking to my staff and saying, “Hey, I think we should really move toward more inclusive structures in our classrooms,” I also need to be able to say to my staff, “And I didn’t always do that that way. Here’s how I did this before, and here’s why I did it that way, and here’s my reflection on why that might not have been right.”

It’s really important for us to be accountable. Part of that accountability, I think, too, is a way that we can repair harm. In any one of our school communities, whether it’s through the staff lens or the family side of the school community, there are ways harm is enacted and ways that bias is upheld or racism or ableism. If we try to just make this like the next thing and that it’s all fluffy and positive and don’t say, “Yeah, so really we’re changing this because the thing that we’ve been doing before is pretty harmful in the larger scheme of it,” if I as a leader am not willing to own that and share some observations or reflections about my own journey, I think that it is very hard to then expect your staff to be able to interrogate their own belief systems or their own biases or their whys and change it.

So I think that’s a really important piece: as a leader, reflect on your work, reflect on the places where you’ve upheld whether it’s racism or in this case ableism, or even how those two really intersect—that racism and ableism have always been working in our school systems and in our society in general to uphold certain ideas which are harmful to certain people. If we can’t own that, even internally, it’s going to be hard for us to move beyond.

Cathi Davis
The other piece is pausing to center ourselves on the humanity that exists within our spaces. If all of our students are just children—at the basic level, if we take away all the labels—we are each an individual who, first and foremost, wants to be in a space where we can presume a level of competency.

Being able to unpack that is important. When we first opened, unpacking ideas like presuming competence or how the assumptions we make about our fellow staff members or the students that enter our classroom can really change everything about how we interact is critical. Most of our pre-service teaching programs, most of our leadership programs—so many of these different parts of the journey of what happens in schools—are still very siloed.

If I’ve been taught that there’s some magic over here that’s different from the magic there and I don’t know things, well, of course I’m going to always be oriented in that way. So we have to do as much as possible to look at what’s really true in that moment for students and staff, and then help staff to be really clear about how these strategies or practices are really working for all students.

I do think that there’s some aspects of inclusionary practices where the conversation is very centered for folks around special education and around general education access. On the other side, there’s an awful lot of pressure that we put on individual students or individual student groups to do well when we say, “We’ll start doing inclusionary practice in our schools because we have this one student that we need to include.”

That’s not building a foundation or structures that serve all students. That’s really reacting to one student, which certainly puts a lot of pressure for that student’s success to basically earn inclusion for themselves and everyone else in their community, which is, in my opinion, really harmful.

When I’m looking at what we know about best practices for supporting all students—what are systems of support that just naturally set up collaboration—those are things that we can help our teachers do and also then enable all students to access those structures and then continue to co-create this new reality of, “Oh, so this classroom can be for everyone because this thing that I’m doing here really was designed with everyone in mind. It wasn’t designed just because this year Matthew’s in my class.”

That’s not sustainable change in practice. Being really clear with staff about some of the nuance of that has been important because then it’s about what they’re doing all the time. It is all of the work, not a new work to add on to something else that they were previously doing.

We can really disrupt and change at any time. We can come into our classrooms tomorrow and think differently and act differently than we did the day before. We don’t need somebody to give us a new policy. We don’t need a different funding stream to come in and just have a different mindset about the work, which organically is going to move it forward.

Tim Villegas
There’s a lot there. Like I’ve told people before, this is a podcast so you can lay it all out there. A couple things that are rolling through my brain—and I’ll just go back to what you said about mindset. The mindset piece is free, right? There’s no monetary cost to that.

I really like what you said about the leader leading the change through reflection—through introspection and self-reflection—because I think that there’s been times where I intuitively knew that something was the right thing to do. Even when I was a teacher in a segregated classroom, I had this general sense that inclusive education is the right thing to do. I should be giving my students more access to not only general education curriculum but same-age peers and the school community.

But I hadn’t done the work myself to really make it urgent. What I’m hearing you say is that part of the work of a leader is to really work on yourself to become the kind of leader that leads this work—whether it is your school and staff, or whether you are a director of special education or an assistant superintendent of instruction or somebody that can really inspire the work on a grander scale. Is that right?

Cathi Davis
I think it’s so important, and I think it’s not real and truthful work if we’re not doing that part of it. It can be performative. I loved what you were getting at too—that even when you want to do something, if you haven’t done the work sometimes to think about it at a deeper level, then maybe your intentions toward doing are still wrapped up in some things.

Ableism in particular—when I think about inclusion and how much we’re always in the school needing to unpack that a lot and confront maybe a bias that exists just in how myself as a principal or my teaching staff might be approaching something—organically, that bias is just so ever-present that we are not able to see it unless we either have spent a fair amount of time thinking about it.

The other thing that’s really beautiful about the growth process is that if you add more voices and perspectives in, you can accelerate that reflection and growth. By myself, I can only reflect so much on what I have and my own experiences or the amount of time I spend trying to imagine other perspectives. But the more people who are invited in to share their story or their perspective, or to look at what I think maybe is a great idea and say, “Hey, that’s maybe not a great idea and here’s why,” that gives me a way to accelerate some of that personal growth too.

Cathi Davis
That’s been something that we get as a gift at Ruby Bridges—we get the gift of many families and many students who teach us all the time that the things we had designed maybe are not perfect for what our intended outcome is, or that there can be more than one way of seeing something and that that’s okay. There’s a way that you can create space for more than one idea.

Our families tell us that a lot. They show us they’re coming from a different perspective, and there are ways we can incorporate that perspective in. It doesn’t matter where you are in the system—if you’re able to take that time to reflect and be honest with the people that are around you, as well as say, “Hey, I don’t have this figured out. I don’t know all of the things we need to do to support every single student every single day.”

But that’s always been true. That’s been true for every leader. Every school doesn’t know how to do all of the things for all of the students at any given time. In the absence of being able to know everything, what I can do is commit to inclusive school values and then learn from that place forward.

There’s an interesting thing that happens where certain scenarios for us feel like an okay place to move away from a value and say, “Well, we’re just gonna wait until we figure it out,” or “We have to get 100% agreement on this thing to do it at all,” as though everything else in our schools has always worked that way. We don’t have 100% agreement on anything and we don’t know anything to 100%, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying every day to do our best effort toward a certain end.

We don’t have to know everything to know that we’re going to have certain values and hold them steady in our process of learning and unlearning and creating a reality in our schools.

Tim Villegas
I would love to know—you have a lot of people come and visit Ruby Bridges. You talk to a lot of educators in the state of Washington and outside. Is there a question that you get about Ruby Bridges that comes up all the time that maybe I wouldn’t think to ask?

Cathi Davis
There’s something about our urgency that I feel like—I don’t know that people ask us a question, but I get this sense from people sometimes that they’re trying to understand where that urgency comes from. People trying to understand why it matters, even while they’re in it thinking it matters, is always just this really interesting thing. I tend to see people wrestling with that a little bit because we are all in on it.

Tim Villegas
So like, kind of like, “Why does this matter so much to you and this school?”

Cathi Davis
Yeah. Because I think that over time our staff has started to really convey that very strongly. Staff have started to reflect on why it really matters. Sometimes the human element—when we look at students who, particularly if a student is identified as having an IEP—there’s a dehumanization process that happens sometimes where we really shift to what something says on a piece of paper as our starting point instead of lifting our eyes up and looking the child or the family in the eye and really seeing them as a human being and moving forward from the person first.

Creating inclusive school spaces is a really deliberate decision that all of us in schools can make all of the time about creating community. When I meet with families, especially on the front end of the school journey, one of the things that has really stuck with me is this idea that our kids don’t get to redo any of the minutes of their educational journey.

The idea of children needing to earn their way into community can seem less impactful if community is a given for you. Whereas for the 5-year-old who might not get a chance to access a classroom community with their peers, or for the parent who’s trying to decide whether they should move their house or whether they need to get a lawyer—all of these different things are just so hard and heartbreaking.

When it comes down to it, I feel like our work and our opportunity is to say we have 188 days every single school year to give our students the maximum opportunity to be in community, to be seen and valued for what they bring to community. Because they don’t get those 188 days back, it is so urgent that we are engaged in creating community every day.

It really does matter if I come to my school tomorrow with that mindset and there’s a difference between this week and next week. There’s a difference between “We’ll wait until next year to try to start this work for a student” because I have students who don’t get kindergarten again. I have students who don’t get third grade and fourth grade again.

That’s very important in thinking about why it matters, but it’s also important in helping anchor us in the fact that schools are comprised of a lot of incredible little people that are wanting to learn and be in community. If we open our eyes and our hearts a little bit and think about the systems we can be working together to build, we can take all 188 days and really invest in community for our students versus divesting them of connection.

It helps anchor me to think about each one of the 500 students in my school as 188 days of investment that we are making in them. To try to focus myself, my team, our work on how to make sure that that investment is going to really contribute to their well-being overall, and that we would recognize that they are giving so much to us in the process too—that they have so much to offer to community and to me and to my learning and my leadership as well.

Tim Villegas
I love it. Thank you so much. This has been great.

Tim Villegas
All right. We have covered a lot of ground, but it’s time for my favorite part, the mystery question. I ask: Cathi, have you ever had a roommate? And if so, what did you hate about it? All right, here we go.

I honestly don’t remember what this is—have you ever had a roommate? This is so weird. I don’t know why this is in here. Have you ever had a roommate? If so, what did you hate about it? That’s so weird. Well, okay, so we’re both married. So we have roommates.

We do have roommates. I mean, yeah. But I’ll go first. I will go first, thank you, and I will talk about my college roommate—my very first college roommate. My first semester of college I actually lived at home and commuted. But then my second semester I moved on campus and it was the freshman dorms.

My first roommate was a Japanese immigrant. I’m not gonna say his name because I doubt he listens to this podcast, just in case. He mostly spoke Japanese—he did speak a little bit of English—but he used to stay up all night. That was something I did not like because we had bunk beds and it was just this little tiny room, and it’d be three or four o’clock in the morning and he’d be wide awake watching TV, wandering around.

I don’t know if it was just what he was used to—being awake at a certain time or whatever—but I did not like that. That’s what I remember. I don’t remember if we ever talked about it or anything. It was a long time ago. So that’s what I did not like about having a roommate: the different schedules.

Cathi Davis
That’s fair. I would agree. I would agree with that one. I was thinking back to college and post-college, and while my work is very extroverted, when I’m not on for work, I prefer a book, a podcast, or a show to watch. I always found it really hard in the roommate capacity that you had to be “on” a little bit more.

Growing up, I’m the middle of three girls, and my younger sister and I wanted to sleep and be in the same room. We created a whole situation of “we’ll have a sleeping room and a playing room,” and we were real proud of ourselves growing up. It wasn’t so much being bothered by being around people, but when people are not your immediate people, there’s this feeling almost of a social situation, and I like to be on and then off.

I would also say sharing a fridge. When you’re not all sharing the same bank account and plans, but you have all of your stuff in the same fridge, there’s that constant “Who took my whatever?” Or, is the butter community butter? Getting flashbacks. As a college student, the “Who took my milk?”—anything that involved the small amount of money that I had for staying alive or keeping my clothes clean—was always a really impactful part of what wasn’t cool about having a roommate.

Tim Villegas
Okay, great. Thank you. I honestly do not remember ever putting this question in there, so that was a surprise for both of us.

Cathi Davis
It’s a bit leading, like, “And what did you hate about that?”

Tim Villegas
I know, right? Sheesh. Okay. It’s rough. We protect the roommates we’ve had before.

Cathi Davis
And our spouses. I love that neither one of us provided anything that would be problematic about our spouse.

Tim Villegas
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Cathi Davis, thank you so much for being on the Think Inclusive Podcast. We really appreciate it.

Cathi Davis
Thanks, Tim. I love your work and I’m just grateful to get a chance to talk to you about our shared visions.

Tim Villegas
That was Cathi Davis. Here’s what I’m taking with me. Belonging is designed—ideally, co-created.

Leaders, how can we protect co-planning time for our educators? How can we model vulnerability, presume competence, and remember the urgency? Kids don’t get these minutes back. We have 188 days—or however many days in your school district—make each one an investment in community.

And here’s one practical step for educators who are moving this work forward: think about who is missing from general education classrooms, from community spaces, schoolwide events. Ask, why are certain students not here and how can we design and co-design spaces where everyone belongs? Please share this episode with a colleague who’s building inclusive schools. Rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. And don’t forget to follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

I just wanted to say something before we get into the credits. If you are part of a school that’s growing in their inclusive practices—whether you are a family or an educator—we want to know about it. I would love to highlight more schools and districts across the country and the world who are doing this phenomenal work. And quick shout out to our listeners in Perth, Western Australia—I hope I’m saying that right—and Phoenix, Arizona.

We are so thankful for each and every one of you who hits play on an episode and invites us into wherever you are listening to the Think Inclusive podcast. You can always reach out to me on social media or email at tvillegas@mcie.org.

Okay, now let’s roll the credits. Think Inclusive is brought to you by me, Tim Villegas. I write, edit, mix, master—basically wear all the podcast hats. This show is a proud production of the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education. Scheduling and additional production help from Jill Wagoner. Our original music is by Miles Kredich, with extra vibes from Melod.ie.

Big thanks to our sponsor, IXL. Visit ixl.com/inclusive. Fun fact, I had the privilege of visiting Ruby Bridges when I was producing our narrative podcast series, Inclusion Stories, and I was met at the office by Philly, a part golden lab mix, who was just one of the supports in the school. And Philly had her own baseball card.

So here’s my question: how can I be cool enough to get a baseball card made of me? If anyone has ideas, let me know. Email me at tvillegas@mcie.org. I read every single message, and if you’ve made it this far, you’re officially part of the Think Inclusive Inclusion Crew. I’m gonna stick with that name.

Want to help us keep the good stuff coming? Head to mcie.org and click donate and toss in a few bucks—$5, $10, $20. It helps keep us partnering with schools and districts to move inclusive practices forward and support educators doing the work. Find us on the socials almost everywhere at Think Inclusive.

Thanks for hanging out, and remember, inclusion always works.