School administrators are challenged to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse school population, including minority, poor, and disabled students. Democratic schooling holds the most promise for student diversity, but its premises are limited for students with intellectual disabilities. The special education profession has disseminated practices and strategies to help administrators integrate disabled students in school. However, viewing students with severe disabilities as special only perpetuates bias and discrimination against them. By understanding how severely disabled students can be active members of the democratic classroom, administrators can apply their awareness and knowledge to the entire range of student diversity in their schools. This paper promulgates the idea of the school administrator as a transformative, intellectual leader capable of transcending intellectual bias to the benefit of all students and staff. After differentiating the transformative intellectual from accommodating and critical/Marxist varieties, the paper discusses the need to expand the principles and practices of democratic schooling to address the range of student diversity. To meet these needs, administrators can parallel teachers' role in the areas of social empowerment, mutuality in living, ways of knowing, and the development of language. By articulating the language of possibility for even the most severely disabled students, transformative administrators make possible the inclusion and success of all other students. Included are 27 references. (MLH)