Our staff was busy last week, covering the high school graduates and commencement ceremonies you can read about in this, our annual Keepsake Graduation Edition. In modern times, the gathering of a community is rare. We value the few ceremonies that remain to unite us.

William Butler Yeats wrote one of our favorite poems, “A Prayer for My Daughter,” in 1918, in the midst of the Anglo-Irish War. One stormy night a few days after his daughter was born, Yeats, filled with gloom, imagined her future as she slept in her cradle. He asked, “How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?”

How, indeed? A graduation ceremony serves as a rite of passage as children often leave the shelter of their hometowns and those they love to try themselves in new worlds. The families and teachers who raised and guided them come together with others in the community to celebrate.

We love the beauty of young faces that our reporters and photographer capture every year — the faces of graduates proud of their accomplishments and looking forward to new challenges. You can see several of them on this page.

No one was given an assignment to take these particular pictures. The faces of these graduates were part of the great mix that make up our schools.

So we were stunned when a press release arrived last week about a bill that would require school districts to develop policies that ensure students with disabilities can take part in their high school graduation ceremonies. Mind you, we have no quarrel with the bill or its sponsor who sent the release, Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara.

Santabarbara is devoted to his 15-year-old son, Michael, who was diagnosed with autism at age 3. We’ve written about legislation he has sponsored that will help kids with autism find work and a place in the world after they age out of the public school system.

We support his earlier work and we support this bill, too. Students may take different routes to graduation but that does not mean they should not be celebrated with their peers by their community. What stunned us was that there are school districts that might not allow students with disabilities to participate in commencement ceremonies.

If anything, students who overcome disabilities to succeed deserve more recognition than those who don’t face such challenges. Why would any school deny them the right to be celebrated?

We are fortunate to cover districts, as the pictures on this page illustrate, that celebrate each student for his or her work. After all, the New York State school motto is: Let each become all he is capable of being.

Alyssa Gaige is pictured here, receiving her diploma at last Saturday’s Berne-Knox-Westerlo graduation ceremony. Over the years, we’ve photographed Gaige competing in the Miss Altamont Fair pageant, dressed for her high school prom, and on stage in Hilltowns Players productions. For a Girl Scout project, which she wrote about on our opinion pages, Gaige visited Altamont businesses in her wheelchair to see which were handicapped accessible and to make recommendations on how those that weren’t could be. We’ve long admired her pluck and grace. Gaige will be attending The College of Saint Rose in the fall.

Also on Saturday, Mia Esper graduated from Guilderland High School. The young man who was her prom date, Nick Mawson, leaned in for a picture to capture the milestone occasion.

Tyler Mazone is another Guilderland graduate. He’s pictured here communicating with Jennifer Thomas, a translator for people who are deaf. Mazone, among other talents, composes music.

He won the Director’s Award for his “outstanding contribution and dedication” to Guilderland High School’s instrumental music program, and he also shared with five others the Guilderland Music Parents and Friends Award, given to seniors for “excellence in music, outstanding contributions and participation in Guilderland’s music program and continued study.” He will be attending the State University of New York College at Potsdam in the fall, known for its famed Crane School of Music.

Each of these students had the support they needed to accomplish what they have. While it’s fine to have a law requiring schools to allow students with disabilities to attend graduation ceremonies, getting them to the point of graduation is just as important.

It’s been a decades-long push for families and supporters of children with disabilities to get them the education they deserve. In 1975, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act was passed, mandating that all children, regardless of disability, had the right to a free, appropriate education in the least restrictive environment. Public schools across the country set up self-contained classrooms and resource rooms to educate students with disabilities.

Just over a decade later, Madeleine Will, who was then the assistant secretary for the federal Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, produced a report describing unintended problems with special-education pull-out programs, advocating instead educating mildly and moderately disabled students in the mainstream of regular education.

That same year, 1986, the National Council on Disability recommended an Americans with Disabilities Act, finally passed in 1990, a wide-ranging civil rights law prohibiting discrimination based on disability and requiring changes — some as basic as ramps to access public buildings — that would force an end to segregation.

But segregation persists:  Just 35 percent of students with disabilities are attending school in regular classes, according to the United States Department of Education’s annual report on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, as the 1975 act was renamed. Of the other 65 percent, 36 percent receive services in a resource room, 24 percent are in self-contained classrooms, and the others are educated outside regular school settings.

The school districts we cover — Guilderland, Voorheesville, and BKW — have all moved to a model of inclusion where students with disabilities, often with an aid, learn in regular classrooms.

When we wrote about inclusion two years ago, Demian Singleton, assistant superintendent for instruction at Guilderland, distinguished it from the earlier trend of mainstreaming special-needs students in regular classrooms. Singleton explained, “Every child in a classroom has strengths and weaknesses, disabilities, if you will…That’s acceptable and valued.”

With mainstreaming, he said, a light was shone on the disability. With inclusiveness, “We shift our expectations. We’re not trying to make everyone normal. We shift to a mindset of focusing on what the student can do, not what the student can’t do.”

Inclusion can help the other children in a classroom, too. Two years ago, we visited Michael Puzio, then 10, a smart boy in a regular classroom at Altamont Elementary School who used a device with buttons to talk to us since he has cerebral palsy.

“Sometimes it’s more fun to play with Michael than anyone else,” said classmate Clare Duerr. “He’s more energetic.”

“We all have differences,” said another fourth-grader, Ian Shaffer. “Mike thinks the same and learns the same...He’s a regular person.”

That’s a great lesson for all of us to learn. As Michael told us, through his device, “All people are the same.”

We look forward to seeing Michael in a cap and gown at the Guilderland graduation ceremony in a few years. And we feel sure he’ll be cheered for.