Georgetown : Aimed at improving the delivery of special education in the public education system, the Ministry of Education is looking to incorporate the expertise of two teachers who are currently completely Masters Degrees overseas in the area of Special Needs Education. At least this is according to Chief Education Officer, Olato Sam.
He revealed that among a list of 10 areas of focus currently gaining the attention of the Ministry, Special Needs Education is situated prominently. According to Sam, the Ministry has recognized that there is a lack of trained teachers in this area. As a result when the teachers in training return it is expected that their knowledge-base will be utilized with a view of training other teachers. “Once those teachers come back into the system we will try to use them to get a larger mass of teachers with those skills and hopefully what will happen now is that you the teachers in our mainstream schools will be trained to recognize pupils who have specials needs, so we will be doing the necessary referrals in some cases and where cases are mild even address those needs within the structures of your classroom.”
The Chief Education Officer was at the time responding to concerns raised by teachers during a meeting of the South Branch of the Guyana Teachers Union last week. According to the CEO Special Needs Education, “is an area of concern…and we have actually had consultations with the Minister about a number of issues and these are things that we want to get right and certainly special needs education is one of them… Again one of the problems is a chicken and egg kind of thing so we need to train more teachers who can deliver the quality of education that our children need.”
Already the Ministry has a Special Education Unit in place at the National Center for Educational Resource Development (NCERD) headed by Ms Karen Hall, and according to Sam efforts have since been made to retain two additional persons to work in the unit.
However, he admitted that the Ministry has recognized that delving into the Special Needs Education programme may not always be the first option for many teachers. As such the Ministry has plans in train to meet with the Guyana Teachers Union very soon to discuss an approach which will see efforts being made to include a different career path mechanism for teachers in Special Needs schools. This, he said, has been recognized as very essential so as to ensure that teachers who wish to be promoted would not have to go outside of the special needs school for that promotion. “You can remain in your school in that very structure or if you opt to move out of that school you can do so and know what level you would be on even if you choose to transfer out.”
“I think that has been a deterrent for many young teachers training in special needs education even though at the Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE) there is such a programme. What we would like to do is to improve the quality of that programme so that it (Special Needs Education) can become a Major.” In light of this decision, Sam said that a decision has been made to send potential special needs lectures at CPCE to undertake a Special Need programme in Jamaica so that they can gain the necessary skills to return and deliver to teachers in training.
Beyond this, Sam said that measures are in place to better house students of special needs education. He revealed that following a visit at the St Roses Visually impaired center, “we have made a commitment that those students and pupils will be moved from there and we have identified the Peter Rose Nursery which is now vacant as the new institution for them.” According to the Chief Education officer, he just recently received the plan for the facility which will allow for the restructuring of the identified building and “hopefully by the beginning of the new academic year we will have a new institution, shared by both those pupils and some students who will come into the system who have autism.”
However, institutions in other Regions which cater to children with special education needs will not be without similar support, as according to Sam “we have recently, through some funding, been able to improve some of these institutions across the country.”
