Something Magical Can Happen
Teaching Tolerance to Children

Something Magical, a program that cuts through prejudice and discrimination to engender tolerance in children, has existed long enough to see the fruit of its lessons endure. After 24 years, this collaboration between HMS School for Children with Cerebral Palsy and Germantown Friends School (GFS) continues to profoundly impact the students involved in the program today and those involved in past years.

Something Magical was born in the 1980’s. After witnessing with outrage a class skit that mimicked people with developmental disabilities, Teresa Maebori, a third/fourth grade teacher at GFS contacted HMS School for Children with Cerebral Palsy in West Philadelphia. With the creative energy of Andrea Green Faigenbaum, then HMS music therapist, they designed a program that would give children from both schools an opportunity to get to know one another, and look past their differences to see how much they are the same.

Each January, Ms. Maebori’s students are partnered with HMS youngsters and travel weekly to HMS. The children play, they talk, they laugh and they get to know each other. Parents who are doctors and specialists speak to the Maebori class about cerebral palsy. The children also research cerebral palsy. At HMS, the students prepare for meeting new friends.

Early in the process, the children begin to prepare for a musical production. They rehearse for the play, one of seven original musicals created by Ms. Faigenbaum for the project. Each show prominently features the children from both schools, incorporating voices and musical instruments, chimes, sticks and electronic communication devices. The performances, held at both schools, are riveting and emotional, with clever costumes, colorful backdrops and broad smiles. For all the students, this is an exciting opportunity to take the stage together.

Each production is based on a theme that serves as a metaphor for the two groups and tolerance in general. This year, the students once again will perform On the Other Side of the Fence, the first musical performed in the program. Just like the animals in the play’s storyline, children from both schools discover through the four-month program that their similarities are a lot broader than their differences, a powerful lesson to learn.