But Dixon, who has cerebral palsy, instead can remain with her friends and teachers while receiving the special attention she needs at UNC's Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute.
A model child-care program offered by the institute includes children with disabilities in the regular classroom and is now open to visitors. It has been in development for about three years.
The Individualizing Inclusion Project serves about 80 children, who range from six weeks to 5 years old, and was researched and implemented jointly by the institute and the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs. The program aims to bring an end to "pullout" therapies in which students with special needs leave the classroom for intervention, said project coordinator Stacy Scott.
"That's not considered best practice anymore," she said.
Scott said researchers at the institute instead have developed methods to incorporate therapies into classroom routines. "The therapy is weaved into (the children's) daily lives," she said.
About 25 percent of the program's students have some kind of disability, and the disabilities range in severity, Scott said.
She said the institute recently finished a study about autism, and many parents who brought their children to the center for the research have now enrolled their children in the inclusion program.
Scott said special-needs students in other programs can get as little as 30 minutes of therapy per week, time that is usually spent either in a clinical setting outside of the classroom or in the child's home. But the "embedded intervention" that is offered by the institute's child-care program increases the amount of direct attention each student receives from teachers and therapists, she said.
Kathy Davis, a speech and language pathologist who worked at similar programs in the past, said embedded intervention is what is needed. "Where (the children) need to use the skills is where we need to teach them," she said.