With the Special Olympics club looking to start its fourth year of activity at Tabor, we are starting to spread beyond the student body and connect with the outside community through various campaigns and programs. 
The Special Olympics club is led by a board comprised of a group of students ranging from sophomores to seniors. The Board is responsible for planning, organizing, and running a majority of the activities that occur each year, with the help of a large group of dedicated student-body volunteers. This past school year, the club hosted a variety of events including a Day of Service in the fall, which worked with the intellectually impaired populations at local schools, a Polar Plunge, a basketball tournament, and a Young Athletes program which ran every Sunday. This year also saw the addition of a spring rowing program, spearheaded by Junior Jack Cederholm.
One of the ways Tabor’s Special Olympic program reaches out to our community beyond those in the club is through the R-word campaign. This campaign is geared towards eliminating the use of the word “retarded” along with its negative connotation. Unfortunately, many people still use this word as an insult, which portrays people with intellectual impairments negatively. However, ever since we started this campaign a couple of years ago, I can happily say I seldom hear the R-word at Tabor. If ever it is said, it is often met with the slogan of the campaign: “Spread the word to end the word.” To be able to do our part in eliminating this hateful word makes the campaign worth it.
Over the course of the past four years the Tabor Special Olympics program has expanded and created many more opportunities. As the nine board members work mostly behind the scenes on planning events, we also get excited to jump in and help with many of the different Special Olympic programs running on campus during the school year: there are over 10 planned each year. We were gratified in our second year of the program to receive a letter in the mail from Special Olympics Massachusetts notifying us that we had became a Unified Champion School. A Unified Champion School is a school that has a youth leadership, a whole school engagement activity, and unified sports. As we wrap up this year of the program and look to the future, we are proud to say that Tabor has been nominated for a second time to be a Unified Champion School!
