As eight Hillcrest School students ran around the track in a relay on Thursday morning, passing a flame-colored torch from hand to hand, the crowd roared in excitement over the start of the school’s eighth annual Special Olympics.
“I just wish everybody could see the ability, not the disability,” said Kathy Richardson, Marion County’s former executive director of student services.
Since 1971, Hillcrest School has served Marion County students with cognitive disabilities in grades 6 through 12 with tailored educational and training programs. Hillcrest School’s Special Olympics was founded to create an event that is inclusive, accessible and built to celebrate students with diverse abilities.
The school began hosting its own Special Olympics event as participation in Marion County Public Schools’ district-wide competition at Forest High School grew. Cristi Schank, who has worked at Hillcrest since 2014 and is now the media specialist, organizes the event. She said the district-wide competition at Forest often meant long wait times and downtime between events, becoming difficult for many students.
“There’s a lot of parents and people who can’t get their kids to the county, and so they wanted to make sure that there was something available at the schools that the schools could do,” Schank said.
Richardson and her daughter, Heather Schneider, cheered from the sidelines. Richardson’s granddaughter, Hannah, participated in six stations: track races, soccer skills, shot put, cornhole, long jump and rotated through a station offering either bowling or the “Olympic Village.”
“You can’t help but just tear up throughout all of it,” Schneider said. “Just seeing the support from the volunteers and the staff and the teachers and these incredible people that are such an important part of our kids’ lives.”
For Schank, her commitment is personal because she has a sister with disabilities. She first got involved with the Special Olympics as a volunteer in Utah while she was a student at Brigham Young University, eventually running the state-level event. For families like Richardson’s and Holly Pitts’, the occasion is one of the few chances for their children to be celebrated, showcased and included.
Pitts, a former paraprofessional at Hillcrest, has attended the event for the past six years to watch her son compete. She called Hillcrest’s Special Olympics a “blessing,” saying opportunities like this were difficult to access before her son enrolled at the school in sixth grade.
Hillcrest’s first official event was in spring 2018, two years before the district-level event was dissolved. With the help of Special Olympics Florida’s school-based programs, Schank brought her knowledge and passion to Hillcrest.
The nonprofit, dedicated to providing year-round sports for people with intellectual disabilities, equipped Hillcrest with the curriculum and supplies to get started. Damien McNeil, the regional director for the Northwest and Northeast, said they help schools adopt different programs to meet their specific needs, supporting as many students as possible.
Before the organization became an official charter in 1972, McNeil said Florida just had 12 athletes with intellectual disabilities in 1968, compared with 85,000 today.
“The schools across the state, they participate in several months of programming, and then they have what we call a ‘culminating event,’ and that’s where they get to celebrate all of the skills that they built,” McNeil said.
Now in its eighth year, Hillcrest’s Special Olympics includes 175 to 190 participants due to its accessibility and inclusivity. Over the past eight years, Schank said 1,336 Hillcrest students have competed in the school’s Special Olympics.
Throughout the event, students rotate through stations every 15 minutes. Schank created her own version of an Olympic Village station, offering sensory-friendly activities to reduce downtime in between events.
“I have games and just fun crafts and things that they can do,” Schank said. “And so I set it up as a rotation so that they’re always doing something.”
What began as a one-day event now spans two days, requiring about 40 to 50 volunteers each day. Volunteers typically include business partners, district and hospital employees, and students from local high schools such as Forest High School and Vanguard High School.
Forest High School’s Air Force Junior ROTC cadets have volunteered for the past three years, assisting with the torch relay and running stations throughout the event. Jeremy Campbell, a junior ROTC instructor at Forest, said he got involved in 2023 when his wife, Sarah, began working as a nurse at Hillcrest and invited the ROTC to help.
He said volunteering not only aligns with the ROTC’s mission of developing citizens of good character but also gives his cadets a sense of fulfillment and perspective.
Adjahnae Piner, coordinator and instructor for the Future Educators Academy at Vanguard High School, said she and her students volunteered for the first time this year to expose aspiring teachers to special education.
“I hope they take away that populations of teaching look different,” Piner said. “We’re all different. We’re all unique … I may have a student who’s like, ‘Oh my goodness, I love this.’”
Typically, the first day is for the higher-functioning students in Rising Stars, who rotate between six stations. The second day, scheduled for Friday morning, contains nine stations for students with more profound disabilities in the MATP Program. Both days last only 2 to 3 hours, helping keep students engaged and reducing behavioral issues, Schank said.
Additionally, what makes Hillcrest’s event unique is how it adapts for students with limited mobility. These athletes rotate through modified events such as bowling, basketball and “tennis strike,” where larger rackets and targets help them hit the ball.
Schank modeled Hillcrest’s event after traditional Special Olympics competitions nationwide, including a torch run, oaths and the National Anthem. Before the event begins, the students recite an athlete’s oath: “Let me win, and if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.”
Students know that the Special Olympics takes place every spring, so they train harder in their physical education course throughout the year to prepare, Schank said.
“Even when they’ve raced and they’ve lost, because everyone is still cheering and super excited, they realize that they’ve accomplished something,” Schank said. “The look on their face and the fist bump in the air, ‘Yeah, I did it,’ just means everything.”
At the end of the competition, students receive red participation ribbons that read, “You’re a champion.” Schank said every student deserves a chance to be an athlete and to be the one everyone is cheering for.
“There are many parents … who their doctors, when their children were growing up, might have told them they’d never really be able to play sports. Well, they got to play sports today, and that can be a really, really cool thing for these parents to witness.”