October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM), a time to recognize the contributions of workers with disabilities and to consider what we can do to expand employment opportunities.

Yet significant employment disparities remain. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2025 only 22.8% of people with disabilities ages 16 and older were employed, compared with 65.2% of people without disabilities. Some of that difference reflects the older age of the disability population, but the disparity remains among working-age adults. Among people with disabilities ages 16–64, only 38.1% were employed. The unemployment rate for people with disabilities was 8.3%, compared with 4.1% for people without disabilities.*

Often, when we talk about increasing opportunities for people with disabilities, the focus is on what happens when a young person reaches high school age.  These include transition services, vocational training, and job searching. But I think we need to begin before high school age.

A fourth- or fifth-grade student is not preparing a résumé or interviewing for a job. They are learning how to communicate what they need, regulate when they become overwhelmed, work with other people, solve problems, accept appropriate feedback, understand how their actions affect others, recover after making a mistake, and advocate for themselves.

This week, I have been thinking a lot about why and when we take a student with neurodivergence out of the classroom and have them sit in the hallway with an aide for being disruptive. I recently had a good conversation with a teacher who said that she did not want the removal of a student from the classroom to make the student feel purely punished, but rather to remove the disruption from the classroom.  I agree that the student should not feel punished.

That concern is particularly important for children with neurodivergence. Many have grown up receiving frequent criticisms and corrections about attention, impulsivity, disorganization, communication, or emotional regulation.

There is an often-repeated claim that a child with ADHD may receive approximately 20,000 more negative or corrective messages by age 10 than a neurotypical child. While that specific number has not been established by strong scientific research and should not be presented as a proven statistic, the idea behind it is worth thinking about.

Think about how quickly the messages can accumulate: 

Be quiet. Sit still. Pay attention. Settle down. You're late again. Why did you forget? Your work is messy. Stop interrupting. Try harder.

Any one statement may seem insignificant, and sometimes students really do need redirection from a positive, strengths-based perspective. But imagine hearing variations of these messages over and over, day after day, year after year. A student may begin to hear the underlying message: “I am always doing something wrong. I disappoint people. I can't do this. Something is wrong with me.”

Repeated experiences can contribute to anxiety, shame, self-doubt, and increased sensitivity to criticism. This is not acceptable for a young person entering the workforce, or any situation. If our long-term goal is a confident young adult who can walk into a workplace and advocate for what they need, we should be thinking about how our responses today are helping build that person.

Supporting students with neurodivergence, however, does not mean removing expectations or accountability. Far from it. A disability does not mean that a person's actions stop affecting other people.

Consider a student who pushes another student. Perhaps the child was overwhelmed, frustrated, impulsive, or dysregulated. Understanding why the behavior happened is essential. It can help us identify triggers, unmet needs, accommodations, and strategies that might prevent it from happening again. But understanding the reason does not erase the impact. A person was pushed and could have been hurt. If you push someone at a job center or at your place of work, there may be serious consequences, disability or not.

The challenge is accountability without shame. Instead of communicating, “You are a problem,” we can say: “Pushing isn't safe. Let's figure out what happened and what you can do differently next time.” The child can understand that if they push someone, they will be held accountable and there will be consequences. That gives the child something extremely important: agency. Let's begin this at an early age.  Additionally, the school and later the workplace need to be educated and take the lead in creating an environment that supports and is accessible to all. 

When a student with neurodivergence is overwhelmed, overstimulated, anxious, frustrated, or dysregulated, another correction may not be what they need. Instead of first saying, "Calm down" or “Stop doing that,” our first questions should be:

“What do you need right now?”

“What would help you right now?”

“What can I do to help you?”

“Would a quiet space help?”

“Would movement help?”

“Would you like me to stay with you or give you some space?”

“Would headphones help?”

“Do you need help getting started?”

A child may not yet know the answer. That is part of what we can partner with the child to learn. Over time, we want that child to begin recognizing, "I know when I am becoming overwhelmed. I know some things that help me. I can communicate what I need." Think about how valuable those skills could become in adulthood. A successful employee may need to recognize that an environment is becoming overwhelming, request an appropriate accommodation, ask a supervisor for clarification, develop an organizational strategy, or take an appropriate break before becoming completely deregulated. What begins in elementary school as “What do you need right now?” can eventually become adult self-advocacy.

We are communicating that we believe they can learn about themselves, develop strategies, ask for support, repair mistakes, and make different choices. These are not merely classroom behavior-management skills. These are skills that affect friendships, education, employment, independent living, and participation in the community.

This is why I believe we need to distinguish between two very different reasons for asking a student to leave a classroom.

A Sensory/Regulation Break means: My nervous system is overwhelmed, and I need support to regulate. 

A Reflection on My Choices Break means: Something happened, and I need to think about my actions and develop a plan for what I will do next. This is different from simply telling a student who is being disruptive to leave the classroom and sit in the hallway.

Supporting a disability by addressing sensory needs and teaching accountability are not competing philosophies. We can say, “Your needs are legitimate, and I will help you.” And “Your actions affect other people, and I will help you learn how to react differently. You must be accountable for your choices.”

National Disability Employment Awareness Month should not only be about encouraging employers to hire adults with disabilities. It should also make us think about how we prepare students with disabilities to enter adulthood, believing that employment and full participation in their communities are possible.

If we want more adults with neurodivergence and disabilities to have meaningful opportunities to work, earn money, build relationships, participate in their communities, and live as independently as possible, we cannot wait until they are teenagers to begin preparing them. That work can begin in an elementary-school classroom today.

 *The employment statistics come from the latest annual U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Disability Report. BLS indicates its 2025 annual estimates are 11-month averages because October 2025 data were not collected during the federal government shutdown, so they are not strictly comparable with annual averages from other years.