The Hindu : Karnataka News : Dealing with children with special needs

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Karnataka

Karnataka

Dealing with children with special needs

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE, MAY 4. Sukhra Bee, teaching in the Government Urdu School in Anekal, did not know what `cerebral palsy' was. Though she has children with special needs in her school, she did not know how to deal with them.

She and 64 others like her from government schools in Bangalore Urban district have realised the problems of children with special needs at a 21-day training programme on inclusive education. The training, which started on April 26, is being organised by the Spastics Society of Karnataka, here.

These teachers are being trained how to handle children with special needs along with normal students. The training, part of the State Government's Sarva Shikshana Abiyan (SSA) scheme, includes two weeks of demonstration and theory classes and one week of practicals.

The Spastics Society was chosen as the State nodal agency centre (SNAC) by the Union Government's National Trust to train government schoolteachers on inclusive education, the Director of the society, Rukmini Krishnaswamy, said.

Giving details of the programme, she told presspersons today that the idea was to train the teachers to maximise the potential of special children by using quick training aids. "These children should be treated as normal kids. It is the teachers who should teach them to socialise and move with others as the parents in villages still have superstitious beliefs and hesitate to take them out," she said.

The training has sessions on human development, hearing/visual impairment, inclusive education and mainstreaming, cerebral palsy, pre-math and math skills, learning disability, behavioural management, mental retardation, vocational skills, autism and psychosocial development of these children, she said.

"The sincere efforts of a sensitised teacher will make a tremendous change in the life of a specially challenged child. Under the SSA scheme, teachers will be provided with the required tools to manage special children," Hema Krishnamurti, head of Human Resource Development Training (HRDT), said.

Three teams from the Spastics Society comprising a therapist, a physician, a counsellor, a special educationist, a psychologist and a parent each were visiting government schools in the districts to create awareness about SSA and guide teachers on inclusive education. Parents would be counselled on how to deal with the children at home, she said.

The teams had already visited 18 of the 27 districts and would continue the programme for the next five years. "We hope to cover at least 500 children by the end of the academic year," she added.

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