What happens when two veteran educators, both parents of neurodiverse children, finally sit down and tell each other the truth they have been carrying for decades?

In this deeply personal episode of Who Needs Shoes, I sit down with my mentor and friend of nearly thirty years, Mike Pipa, National Board Certified ELA teacher, building administrator, and now an Instructional Design Coach with the Capital Area School Development Association. What begins as an interview becomes something I didn't fully anticipate: a mirror. Because the story Mike has been living as a parent is not so different from the one I have been living too.

Mike takes us back to the early 1990s, when the word "autism" carried almost no roadmap with it, not for families, and certainly not for schools. He walks us through the moment a developmental pediatric psychologist, who understood his child's neural profile from the inside out, gave his family not just a diagnosis, but a direction. He speaks honestly about the grief that arrives when the parenting story you imagined has to be released, and about the breaking and remaking that follows, again and again, as you learn to see the world through your child's eyes.

And running like a thread through all of it, through thirty-seven years in classrooms, through IEP meetings and parent conferences, through his work coaching educators today, is a conviction he has never let go of: that the soul of a school is not found in its data or its compliance, but in whether every child inside it is treated as our child.

"Every child is our child. It's the system that lulls us into the falsehood that that's not true." — Mike Pipa

"I'm less interested in a diagnosis than in the person sitting in front of me."

For nearly 18 years, music therapist Tori Emery has been building spaces where neurodivergent children, their families, and people on the margins of community don't have to change to belong. In this episode of Who Needs Shoes, host Tanya Manning-Yarde, PhD sits down with Tori to explore what it actually means to meet someone exactly where they are — and what becomes possible when you do.

What We Explore:

*The Yes Space Philosophy. Tori walks us through how she designs her practice — and her life — around removing the burden of change from the child. When the environment says yes, people create, connect, and heal.

*Music as a Clinical Instrument. From the NICU to pediatric wards, Tori reads heart rate, oxygen saturation, and nonverbal cues in real time — adjusting key, tempo, and volume not by instinct alone, but by science. Hear what that level of attunement actually looks like in practice.

*The ISO Principle. One of music therapy's foundational techniques — and one of the most transferable lessons in this conversation. You don't pull someone toward healing. You start where they are.

*What Ghana Taught Her About Community. Tori traveled to Ghana and came back changed — not because of what she offered, but because of what she witnessed: a culture where music isn't a commodity or a clinical tool. It's just life. Communal, unselfconscious, and for everyone.

*LoveWorks, Maggie's Love Boxes, and the Buddy Program. How do you make love tangible? You pack a box for a child in the NICU. You create a sensory room at a church and ask families what belonging actually feels like to them — rather than assuming you already know.

*Her Closing Thought — and the One Worth Sitting With:

"There's a lot more we have in common than we think."

Whether you're a parent searching for a space where your child is celebrated, a clinician who wants to reconnect with why you started, or someone who believes that community is a form of medicine — this conversation is for you.

Find Tori:

Serenade Music Therapy: serenademt.com

Find the Show:

whoneedshoes.com | askwhoneedshoes@gmail.com | @whoneedshoes on Instagram

For decades, the American public school system has operated on a binary: you are either "in" the general classroom or you are "out." But my guest today, Michele Gardner, CEO of All In for Inclusive Education, suggests that physical proximity is often mistaken for actual membership.

Michele has spent her career navigating the tension between the legal machinery of special education and the human rights of the children inside it. From managing multimillion-dollar budgets to witnessing the "messy" magic of a percussion program for deaf students, she has seen firsthand how our definitions of competence can either open doors or lock them.

In this episode, we sit down to discuss:

*The "Indicators" of Belonging: Why the most profound shifts in a classroom can be felt before they are seen.

*The Dignity of Risk: Why protecting a student from failure can sometimes be its own form of exclusion.

*Adult Readiness: Moving the conversation away from whether a child is "ready" to whether the system is prepared to receive them.

It is a conversation about the evolution of teacher training, the vital expertise of parents, and the slow, often painful pace of systemic change.

Link:https://www.allinforinclusiveed.org/