You can see it when you drive down Interstate 95 on the Thurbers Avenue corner.

It’s like an oasis among the asphalt parking lots that dot the Providence neighborhood, with green space – and lots of it.

It’s all part of the Meeting Street School campus, which opened at 1000 Eddy St. seven years ago. The state-of-the-art facility sits on over seven acres of land complete with a picture-perfect soccer field, an oversized green space with a playground and gardens galore.

The facility currently services 3,000 families from all over Rhode Island, as well as nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut. They are families of children with disabilities, and those without.

That’s right – Meeting Street School is not just for children with disabilities.

This is a common misconception, according to Cecilia Pirotto, director of marketing the school. According to Meeting Street’s history, when the school was created nearly 70 years ago by Dr. Eric Denhoff, it was geared exclusively toward children with disabilities and developmental delays. Since that time, however, it has evolved to take on a new model – one of “full inclusion.”

Today, Meeting Street School is known as one of the first of its kind to embrace the “full inclusion” approach, Pirotto said. Children of all developmental abilities, ranging in age from newborns to 22 years, can attend the school.

The 76,000-square-foot building is laid out in separate wings, with each age group designated to a specific area. There is the Early Learning Center, which caters to children six weeks to five years old. There is the Grace School, which provides academics and personal growth in an all-inclusive classroom setting for kindergarteners to fifth-graders.

There is also the Carter Middle and High School, which is currently geared exclusively toward special needs students. There are plans to expand the concept of the Grace School beyond fifth grade as early as this coming fall, with the development of the sixth grade come September 2015.

The students in each of these programs abide by state-mandated and national education standards, Pirotto said. The Early Learning Center, she said, abides by the Rhode Island Early Learning Development Standards and emphasizes learning through exploration and play-based discovery.

The students in the Grace School participate in all of the typical activities and requirements found in a public school setting, as well as a cornucopia of others. All of the students learn sign language. All of the students get to go swimming as part of their typical gym program. All of the students get to work with clay, operate a kiln and fire their own ceramic projects. All of the students get to ride bikes inside the school building – there are close to 100 different types of bicycles on campus, each created in a unique way so that every student has the opportunity to try to ride.

In addition to a well-rounded educational component, the students in the Carter Middle and High School program are partnered with outside organizations and agencies to learn employable skills. They also do a lot of life-skills training in their on-site, independent living center, which is complete with a washer and dryer, a kitchen, a bed and a living area.

Ashley DeSimone, manager of special events for Meeting Street, said that they are taught to do their own laundry, make their beds, cook and clean up after themselves – “a lot of the skills that many people just take for granted.”

In addition to the classroom settings offered at Meeting Street, the institution also provides an array of other as-needed services including physical and occupational therapy. There are several sensory integration rooms on site. There is also a library, a computer lab, a full-size, state-of-the-art gymnasium, and a four-foot-deep saltwater swimming pool, along with programs in art, theatre and music.

“We are such a unique campus and we have so many different professionals working right here under this one roof. That, I think, is the biggest draw for our families,” DeSimone said. “The academic concept is the same as a public-school setting. We have all of the academic classes, we have art, music and theatre – we just also have a little more technology and a little more tools so that everything that all of our students need, they have, so that all of our students can participate in every program together.

“And since so many of our kids are learning at their own pace and according to their own needs, our ratios are much different,” she continued. “The real benefit of the inclusion part always seems to come later for families, but it’s our real innovative approach to education that families who come here initially see.”

An obstacle currently faced by Meeting Street, according to Pirotto, is getting families to realize that the school is there, and is more than simply a special needs institution. It was a misconception she shared before enrolling her own children – who do not have special needs – in the program. She joined the Meeting Street team as a full-time employee this past November.

“I am not originally from around here. I come from Argentina, so when I first moved here and was looking for somewhere for my child to go to school while I was working all day, I searched and searched different facilities before I came across Meeting Street,” said Pirotto, who currently resides in the Edgewood section of Cranston. “I didn’t have anyone here, really, except my husband, and he was working all day, too, so I was really looking for somewhere that I could feel was like family when I was leaving my baby while I was at work all day. And until I came here, I just didn’t find that.”

Pirotto said the minute that she walked into Meeting Street, she felt an overwhelming sense of acceptance. She said the director made himself available, the teachers and the staff were all on hand for questions, the school building was made available for tours and the entire academic concept was detailed.

“This is a really, really amazing place. As a parent, and a parent of a child who attended the school, this model changes all of us. It gives you a different perspective. It’s been an amazing learning experience for me and my children,” she said. “I was saying something one day – I still speak with an accent, and my daughter was like ‘No mommy, that’s not how you say that, you have to put your hand to your throat and say it like this,’ and I knew she only knew that because she heard the speech specialist that was working with one of the other students in her class. And I think it’s just wonderful that she is exposed to these educational opportunities.”

These and many other growth experiences are all part of the inclusion concept that the Meeting Street School prides itself of teaching, according to DeSimone. One of the other major “learned behavior lessons” at the school is empathy. It is, she said, a quality that all of the students, staff and operations employees at the school have acquired after being there, sometimes for even as short as a few days or hours.

DeSimone said that “it is a known fact” that empathy is a “learned behavior,” and that all of the students might not realize it on a day-to-day basis, but each day that they share their teachers, their classrooms and their lessons with other kids – kids who might be different – it teaches them to have and show compassion, to be polite and patient and to leave the facility each day feeling a little empathetically richer than they did the day before.

The school is currently running open enrollment for the Grace School, as well as the Early Learning Center for the fall. As of yet, there are no waiting lists to get into the programs, but they are all tuition-based.

More information about financial aid and accessibility is available by contacting Meeting Street at 401-533-9100 or visiting meetingstreet.org.