Unlike traditional high school athletic teams, Unified Sports teams are designed to immerse students with intellectual disabilities in a facet of school culture that has largely eluded them. Nationwide, more than 2,000 schools in 42 states have the teams, where the ideal is for about half the athletes on each team to be students with intellectual disabilities, such as Down syndrome, and the rest partner athletes who play alongside them. Unified Sports was created by the Special Olympics more than 20 years ago, but the program has had a recent surge in popularity, the organization reports, in part because of a broader effort to foster an inclusive culture that extends beyond the gymnasium or the playing field called Project Unify. Since that program was established in 2008, the U.S. Department of Education has devoted more than $30 million to it. About 22,000 students across the country are involved in Unified Sports teams, and Special Olympics estimates that 20 times that number have been touched in some way by the program's offshoots.