On April 30, 2022, the annual Special Olympics event at Fieldston was hosted for the first time in-person since 2019. It is the largest student volunteer and oriented event the school holds each year. Athletes with intellectual disabilities come from places across New York to participate in the swimming and basketball invitational.
To prepare for this event, Fieldston students created posters for all the teams coming to campus, organized coaching staff for the games, and were a definitive support system for the athletes. After three years without this beloved and impactful event, Fieldston students approached it with full force, positivity, and immense excitement.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of President John F. Kennedy, founded Special Olympics in 1968 in Washington, D.C. After seeing how unfairly people with intellectual disabilities were treated, she called to action to create a community for those individuals.
The Special Olympics was created in the 1960s by Eunice Kennedy Shriver. She was born in Brookline, Massachusetts on July 10th, 1921. She is the younger sister of John and the older sister to Robert F. Kennedy. She started Special Olympics because she witnessed and realized how unfairly the kids with intellectual disabilities were treated. She has five children and knows the importance of physical activity in children’s lives. Unlike others, instead of seeing a problem and allowing it to become more of an issue, she took action and made the necessary steps to allow children with intellectual disabilities to have an outlet. This took a long time to start and when it first began in June of 1962 it was only a camp she was running at her house and six years later on July 20th, 1968 the first-ever Special Olympics happens in Chicago.
Behind the scenes of everything Special Olympics related is Upper School History Teacher Karen Drohan. In 2015 – when Drohan began teaching at Fieldston –the shoes of the Special Olympics club needed to be filled. Without much knowledge of the organization, Drohan willingly had the courage to take over the club as a faculty advisor. Yet, despite her concerns, the class of 2016 helped carry and guide her through the first event she was part of.
When talking with Drohan about what Special Olympics means to her and her family, she reported that “It means success for my family. It means self-esteem. I see it as an organization that allows children and adults to have a place in the world and a place in the world that is valid, legitimate, and important”.
She also believes that “people with intellectual disabilities are a very ignored group of people, and with a child with severe learning disabilities and developmental delays, I think that she gets overlooked, and Special Olympics is a way for me just to remind her and the world, not to overlook people with intellectual disabilities.”
Other schools that may host Special Olympic invitationals typically rent out a gym for the basketball invitational, however, Fieldston puts on a whole show: we provide lunch, t-shirts, and cheer. Student volunteers are enthused to speak with the athletes and connect with them differently than they have ever experienced. This year, Fieldston had approximately 120 students participating. Drohan says that “Students don’t get anything for this. You don’t get community service hours or credit in any classes. Students at Fieldston come to do this because they believe in it and enjoy it. And that gets translated to the athletes”.
In talking to a coach from one of the teams participating in the invitational this year, Drohan mentioned how he said every poster that Fieldston has ever made for the opening ceremonies for his team is framed in their sports club.
This is the exact spirit Fieldston students bring to and embody throughout Special Olympics. “And to be able to cheer them on just means so much to the athletes that participate. The day itself is a long exhausting day, but I say all the time that it is the hardest and best day of my school year”, Drohan said.
Without the dedication of Ms. Drohan, the student volunteers, and the Fieldston community as a whole, Special Olympics would not nearly be as successful as it is today. The empathy that is brought to the event is unlike any other. If you would like to participate in Special Olympics next year, sign up for the club in the fall!
