This year at Legacy High School our school’s focus is to foster a sense of belonging for each student. Be here, be you, belong. What does it mean to belong at your school? To feel that you belong means to have a sense of inclusion, acceptance, and support of your identity in a particular group. For some, an essential part of finding your niche and identity at your school is joining extracurricular activities such as Legacy’s Bridges club. Bridges is a club for special education and general education students to make friends and participate in fun activities. To fully explore how Legacy fosters a sense of belonging, I interviewed Ms. Brianna Conroy, the Legacy Bridges club sponsor.

1). Tell us about yourself. What do you teach? How long have you taught?

My name is Miss Conroy. I teach special education for students with significant support needs. I have been at legacy for four years, I was a para before I was a teacher. My first year as a teacher was in 2020. Prior to working in the high school setting, I worked for the University of Nebraska, and I ran a cattle ranch (that was all research oriented). It’s been interesting making the jump from working with graduate students to being with high schoolers, and the public school system is something that I’m still being educated on. I love working in special education; it’s my favorite thing in the whole world.

2). What is the Bridges club?

The Bridges club is basically a school club where students from special education form friendships with students from general education. It’s about just spending time together; we do a lot of creative projects, take field trips together, just kind of building those relationships between special education and general education. It ends up being like a very long lasting, meaningful relationship for everyone involved. And I’ve seen friendships kind of span outside of school and beyond high school, and it ends up being really meaningful for all the kids.

3). What do you have planned for the Bridges club this year?

We do a lot of hands-on projects week to week. Our biggest thing coming up right now is our field trips. We are preparing for a field trip that we do with Positive PE. Most of our students who are in Bridges are also in Positive PE, which is structured the same as Bridges (it really works hand in hand together). We’re going to the Denver Zoo in October, so we’re kind of getting ourselves organized for that trip. We also have a Halloween party; we tried this last year, and it went really well, so we’re gonna do it again. It’s like a full day on Halloween where we go to a pumpkin patch (our pumpkin patch is behind Legacy). We go pick pumpkins from the fields back there on that little strip. And then we bring them in and carve pumpkins and like, tell scary stories and do apple cider. And it’s like a whole day’s event, so we’re gonna do that with Bridges. And then we are doing a fall kind of pre-Thanksgiving party; we always have a big potluck. We just have a lot of holiday parties. Everyone brings food, plays games. It’s really just some time to just recreate with each other and hang out.

4). What are some of your favorite past events Bridges has had?

I mean, I always enjoy field trips, I always enjoy the potluck. The field trips have been pretty special, and that is again in conjunction with Positive PE Bridges and the SSN program. We’ve gone to the museum a couple times, the zoo, and then I think we’re going to try to do something a little bit different for the spring. Those are always, I think, a favorite of everyone. I think the pumpkin carving was probably what I thought was the most fun. The kids found it really memorable. They all have the costumes on and it seemed like the messier the better, so I liked that. A lot of our pot or our Bridges partners work with Special Olympics; we have unified events like unified basketball, we have a bowling team right now, we did some things over the summer. Some of the kids did Special Olympics like soccer with the Rapids last year, and traveled with the team to LA and did some different things. And so some of our students who are involved with Bridges also get involved with Special Olympics; that ends up being a really, really fun thing. Unified basketball in the spring. It’s always fun to have that kind of crossover too.

5). What is your favorite thing about having the Bridges club at Legacy? 

I just really enjoy seeing the friendships between students form and maintain over a couple of years while they’re through high school. It just seems like they are really long lasting. And even students who have gone to college, come back and visit us. Students maintain those relationships kind of beyond legacy, which I think is really special. I always love to see that and then just the connections through school where we’ll walk through the halls and kids in my class are getting high fives and know a lot of people. The friendships that are formed and seeing that happen everyday at school and throughout the years is really fun to see kind of grow and flourish.

6). Why should students join?

I just think it’s a very, very welcoming club; our whole theme is being inclusive, and I think that’s a good theme to hold true across many areas of life (being inclusive and welcoming to everyone). I think it’s just always a place where people feel safe and at home. I feel like that’s just how the personalities are in that club, and so I just think it’s a very good group of people. It’s just always fun, always.

7). How can students get involved with Bridges?

Bridges meets every other Wednesday. If you’re in Positive PE you are always involved with Bridges, so if anyone’s interested in Positive PE, that’s a good way to do it. We do most of our activities in seventh hour, every other Wednesday, so anybody is welcome to join us during that period of time. We are also doing kind of like a lunch club, so if you want to come fourth, fifth, or sixth to A102 every other Wednesday, then we can eat lunch together and visit and hang out and watch movies.

Bridges truly is a special club that we offer. Please stop by A102 for lunch if you are interested in getting involved. I would like to give a special thanks to Miss Conroy for doing this interview!

Just remember, you belong at Legacy! #BoltzBelong