If you’re into March Madness buzzer beaters and Cinderella stories, Rocketship’s tournament was one for the ages.

Cheers erupted from both sides of the court as fans watched several three-foot-something kids soaring impressive  slam-dunks into a net three times their height — with a boost from their P.E. coach, of course.

This stunning spectacle, with students, teachers and parents of all backgrounds and abilities cheering both teams on, perfectly encapsulated Santa Clara County’s first ever partnership with the Special Olympics.

About 100 basketball stars from Mosaic Elementary, Discovery Prep and Brilliant Minds faced off in late March at the East Valley Family YMCA, including several players from Rocketship’s Specialized Inclusion Program (SIP). Dozens of other students also came to cheer on their classmates, showing their school spirit from the sidelines with colorful handmade signs. Just as the Special Olympics aims to empower and unite athletes with and without disabilities, the SIP model helps students with moderate to severe disabilities learn alongside their general education peers for most of the school day.

Mosaic parent Tanisha Kruger saw the event as a unique learning opportunity for her son Bryce, a student in the SIP program.

“People don’t always understand that just because someone has a disability, it doesn’t mean the rest of them is disabled. They’re still whole, and they just want to play with their friends, be a part of the competition and feel included,” Kruger said.

Throughout the tournament, students of all grades and abilities showed off their teamwork in games against the other schools. They also participated in a skills competition for dribbling, passing and shooting. P.E. coaches conducted weekly practices for the six weeks leading up to the event, and for many players, it was their first experience being part of an athletic team.

Integrated special education teacher Hannah Gray, who coordinated the event to engage her students outside the classroom, watched all the players — both students with and without learning disabilities - grow and learn.

“It was great to hear kids tell me how excited they were for basketball practice after school. The practices were pretty exhausting, but seeing all of the hard work pay off on the faces of the kids was totally worth it,” Ms. Gray said.

After this pilot season with three schools, the Special Olympics partnership will include two events in the 2015 school year. Kruger and Bryce are excited for more fun and inclusive opportunities to meet families from different schools in the future.

In response to the extreme drought and the changes we’ve all witnessed in our communities, we designed an affordable gray water system that would enable residents to save up to 37 percent of fresh water use.

Our engineering team was thrilled and excited when we made it past the first round of the competition. We continued to work on our project, meeting up on the weekends and breaks.

It paid off. We continued to make our way through the stages of the competition and gained more excitement with each step. After we were admitted as one of 15 national finalists, we were all determined to win. We got the opportunity to go to New York and see the 14 other creative presentations.

When I learned our team was one of the five national finalists, I was excited and surprised that, as a group, we were able to accomplish such a big thing. Being in this club and competition has given us so many opportunities and opened so many doors for us that we would have never thought were possible. We went to New York and visited colleges that we’ve only heard about, and we went places I’ve only seen in the movies. This competition has really shown me that I can uplift my community using STEM and solve problems we face every day.

After everything we have experienced, the wind milling punches of shock and awe that came with winning $150,000 in technology for our school, being able to visit New York and building an accessible gray water system, I can say these experiences changed our lives.

Personally, this is credited to being raised in an environment that nurtured our desire for education. Without the help of my education at Rocketship and the wonderful teachers that supported me along the way, I would have not been able to arrive at where I am today. I thank Rocketship for pushing me to expand beyond the normal capabilities that would be called for in “average schools.”

Rocketship has nurtured countless other futures and given children a fighting chance to receive a quality education. I’ve noticed it along the countless street corners where the chances of a better education are expanding as more Rocketship schools expand. It always brings me joy to know that we were a part of a great experiment that turned out to be amazing. I only ask for you to continue to fight to close the achievement gap.

Teachers spend more than one thousand hours with their students each year. We make deliberate and conscious decisions for every lesson we teach. Everything in our classrooms — from the anchor charts and desk arrangements to lesson hooks and essay topics — are decisions we make to ensure our kids thrive and realize their incredible potential. It is key for teachers to have the autonomy to make these choices in our classrooms, but it is also imperative that we have a voice in the decision making at the school and network or district level.

I started my teaching career in a New York City middle school in 2008, and while I was new to the profession, I quickly became frustrated by the administration’s decisions that often seemed to go directly against the interests of my students. I remember one day in my first year, my principal barged into my room and announced to the class that she would be taking a handful of “good” students to the movie theater that day. While well-intentioned, the outcome was a room full of students angrily asking, “But why don’t I get to go?”

Unfortunately, this moment was indicative of the fact that the school had developed a culture in which decisions were made top-down, often seemingly haphazardly and with utter disregard for the needs and interests of our students. I knew, if I wanted to make a real impact in my students’ lives, I needed a change.

When I eventually transitioned into a different school context, I was immediately aware of a shift in the dynamic between school leaders and teachers. First at KIPP in New York, and then here at Rocketship in San Jose, it became clear to me that school leaders valued open and candid conversations with teachers. While not always perfect, it was refreshing and led to a higher degree of cohesion.

Rocketship has utilized a number of practices to gather teacher input (satisfaction surveys, teacher focus groups, etc). However, as a growing and evolving network, there is always opportunity to further infuse teacher voice into school — and network-wide decisions. At the beginning of the 2014-15 school year, I joined forces with leadership from Rocketship’s Network Support Team and we began planning what eventually became the Teacher Advisory Group.

With a national teacher shortage threatening the future of public education, we knew increasing the role of teacher voice in Rocketship would help us discover ways to better retain and develop talent and achieve our mission to eliminate the achievement gap in our lifetime.

We set out to bring our most experienced teachers into the group. Ultimately, the teachers who signed on not only brought experience, but also warmth, wisdom and, above all, an ability to thoughtfully and powerfully articulate their ideas, even late into the evening after a long day at school. For anyone who has ever attended a meeting after 5 p.m. on a school night, you know this is no small feat.

Throughout the year, we tackled a variety of issues, including:

• the development of the Teacher Professional Development Fund. This fund pays for external PD opportunities ranging from language study abroad to instructional workshops

• the creation of an internal teacher time study to better understand how teachers currently spend their time to find ways to support efficiency and sustainability

• shifts in the assessments calendar to maximize data-driven instruction

While the group expressed ideas and provided feedback, network leadership actively listened, responded to ideas and asked follow-up questions to probe a bit further. By participating in this ongoing dialogue, teachers learned more about the various factors that impact network decision-making processes and network leaders were able to get real-time feedback on ideas before rolling them out network-wide.

I am impressed by the progress that the group made in the 2014-15 academic school year and I look forward to seeing what it achieves in the year to come.

Rocketship is an organization that belongs to all of us, and our mission to eliminate the achievement gap in our lifetime requires that we all play a role in making our schools an excellent place to learn and an empowering place to teach.