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REL High School starts 'Best Buddies' program

"While some students may act or look a little different, at the end of the day we are all Lee Raiders and I want to remind the campus of that."

TYLER — 'Best Buddies,' the national program that gives students a way to build one-on-one friendships with fellow classmates with intellectual and developmental disabilities, has a new chapter in East Texas!

Robert E. Lee High School announced on Thursday that they are launching a 'Best Buddies' program at their school to encourage "positive friendships throughout the entire student body."

“While some students may act or look a little different, at the end of the day we are all Lee Raiders and I want to remind the campus of that,” Austin Doyle, special education teacher at Lee, said. “We just began signing students up for Best Buddies this week and are overwhelmed with the amount of students wanting to participate, which is currently around 40 or so.”

Natalie Parnell, a senior at REL and the new program's vice president, hopes that 'Best Buddies' will change perceptions that people with special needs are not capable of forming friendships or relationships with others.

“We hope the Best Buddies program will show that people with special needs are definitely capable of forming friendships if everyone just took the time to get to know each other,” Natalie said. “We are often taught about inclusion as prevention to bullying-type behaviors, but we also need to learn to extend this inclusion to our special needs friends as well.”

To start things off, students involved in the new program are mainly getting to know each other by eating lunch together.

The school's first big "Best Buddies Kick-Off" event is planned for October 19, 2018 with a campus tailgate after the school's Homecoming Pep Rally.

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