Jillaine Berardi will tell you she got into school leadership because she got nosy. She wanted to know who was making the decisions. That is the real story, she says, more honest than any polished version of a career arc.
Twenty-one years later she is the assistant superintendent of three schools inside Ulster BOCES in New York. Her son Ben graduated recently. Ben hated school growing up. Had tons of friends, zero interest in what the building wanted from him. She talks about him without any drama, just a kind of clarity that comes from watching the system fail someone you love and then spending a career trying to fix it.
Who Her Students Are
The kids in Jillaine’s schools did not choose to be there. That is the first thing she wants people to understand. They are not there because they picked a program or wanted a change of scenery. They are there because their home districts ran out of road for them. Ninety-five percent have IEPs. Most carry what she calls the most intense needs. And most of them have spent years in buildings where the whole enterprise of school has been distilled into one word: compliance. Work on your goals. Manage the hard things. Get through the day.
Jillaine has been trying to dismantle that for eight years.
“Our kids, they don’t have the option to come here. They don’t fit in their community. They come to us and we love having them. And our staff are really centered around wanting them to feel passionate and feel purpose first, not here’s your IEP, we’re going to drive with this IEP.” — Jillaine Berardi
The shift she has watched over those eight years is slow but real. The dominant conversation in her buildings used to be about behavior. Now it is about teaching and learning. She said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. It is also, in special education, genuinely rare.
Everyone Is In the Room
The model she has built runs twice a year. A full month of planning before each phase, and everyone comes in. Not just teachers. Occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech therapists, aides, social workers. All of them sit down together and do empathy interviews with students. They ask the kids what they want to do. What they are interested in. What lights something up.
Then they build experiences around those answers.
“They’re the experts. They understand fine motor, large motor, cognitive ability, SEL. So they design around these children.” — Jillaine Berardi
It sounds simple. It is actually a complete rethinking of who gets to be in the design conversation for a kid’s education. For most students with IEPs, the people who know them best are consulted separately, in silos, and their knowledge rarely makes it into the same room at the same time. Jillaine put them in the same room. That is the whole model, right there.
The Wheelchair
There is a staff member at one of Jillaine’s schools who uses a wheelchair. Someone decided to give the students a challenge: figure out what he needs, then build it for him.
They started by interviewing him. Asking what was missing, what would help, what he had always wanted but never had. Then they designed. Then they built. Cup holders. Custom fittings. Parts they cut themselves, assembled themselves, tested and reworked. It took months. They did the whole thing for someone they actually knew and liked, which Jillaine will tell you is what made all the difference.
“They were so happy because they did this for a community member that was close to them. And now they have a prototype that others in wheelchairs can use.” — Jillaine Berardi
Evin made the point that those kids just hit every New York State standard anyone could name. Engineering. Communication. Design iteration. Empathy. Real application. He is right. The more important point is that none of them were thinking about standards while they were doing it. They were thinking about the person in the wheelchair.
That is what experience-first learning actually looks like up close.
What She Is Building This Summer
Jillaine used a phrase in the conversation that I keep coming back to. Experience is the new standard. She said it almost in passing, in the middle of a longer answer about assessment, and it landed like something that had been true for a long time and had finally found the right words.
She is opening a lab school this fall. A campus with a middle school and high school, built around culinary arts and maker spaces and deep project cycles. Teachers are spending the summer designing it together, not receiving a plan from above. The question they are working through is a genuinely hard one: if you lead with experience instead of content, how do you know what a student actually learned? Not through a single test. Through rubrics students help design, through documentation, through evidence that takes longer to gather and tells you something real.
She does not have the full answer yet. She said so plainly and then kept going, which is the sign of someone who is not waiting for certainty before doing the work.
Thinkering x Deeper Learning New York
Jillaine and her team are running a three-hour session at Deeper Learning New York in Kingston on July 14th and 15th. Our team is on the ground! Attendees will go through a full PBL cycle. They will design something, tune it, reflect on it, and finish with tools across three levels: leadership, teacher and community, and student. Thinkering will be there to share the impact!
If you are going, come find us. If you are not, follow along here because the work being done inside Ulster BOCES right now is worth paying attention to.
Jillaine Berardi is assistant superintendent of programs at Ulster BOCES in New York. Deeper Learning New York takes place July 14th and 15th in Kingston. For fellowship information reach us at thinkeringcollective.org
