When Ms. Roybal, a phys-ed teacher in Albuquerque, started a Unified Sports basketball team in 2019, she had eleven kids show up to the first practice — six with intellectual disabilities, five without — and a borrowed cart of cones from the wrestling coach.
By 2024 her school had a 26-player roster, a junior-varsity feeder, and a budget line in the athletic department. By 2026 her district had it written into the activities handbook.
That arc is now repeating in something close to 9,000 American schools, according to the Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools program’s latest count. Forty-eight states have at least one participating school. Twelve have statewide policy frameworks. Three — Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Mexico — fund it as a line item out of the state department of education.
The growth surprised the people running it. The program was designed in 2008 as a small intervention to reduce bullying. The athletic component was supposed to be a soft entry point. Instead it became the engine.
“Coaches keep telling us the same thing,” said Tim Shriver Jr., who leads the schools program. “When you build a team where the goal is for two different kinds of kids to make each other better, you don’t have to teach inclusion. The kids will run it themselves and they’ll get frustrated with you if you slow them down.”
The data follows the anecdotes. A 2024 evaluation by the University of Wisconsin found that Unified schools reported lower disciplinary referrals, higher attendance among students in special-education tracks, and — interestingly — better state-test math scores in feeder middle schools. The mechanism isn’t fully understood. The hypothesis is straightforward enough: kids who feel like they belong to a team show up.
Internationally, the model is starting to travel. Unified Champion Schools-style programs are now running in 24 countries, with a notable cluster in Greece — where the legacy of the 2011 Athens Games is often cited as the reason the country had a head start on school-based inclusion.