Editorial | When deaf and degreed isn’t page-one news

That this newspaper placed Celine Lobban’s story on its front page on Saturday suggests that she is still a rarity. Ms Lobban, 25, graduated last week from the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech) with a bachelor’s in computer studies. She is deaf.

At UTech, Ms Lobban did not encounter too many other deaf students. “I did feel lonely sometimes because I was the only deaf student in the entire class,” she told The Gleaner through a sign language interpreter. “I wanted to communicate with them, but they could hear and I am deaf.”

The yearning for connection, though, was not the foremost of Ms Lobban’s challenges as a student. A much greater problem was simply following her lecturers, who didn’t sign for the deaf.

“Right now in Jamaica, you don’t have a lot of interpreters available, so when you (deaf people) think about going to university, the first thing you think about is, who is going to interpret for me? And then you also think about the financial aspect of that, in terms of paying the interpreters ... .”

Even with her tuition scholarship from National Commercial Bank, paying for an interpreter was an ongoing challenge. This raises questions about inclusivity at Jamaica’s tertiary institutions for people with disabilities who, having survived the gauntlet of the early system, make it to university or other post-secondary institutions. It is a matter which, despite their understandable focus on the foundational sectors of the system, was insufficiently analysed by the Orlando Patterson Commission on education transformation in Jamaica.

BEST POSSIBLE ENVIRONMENT

Nonetheless, the tertiary institutions themselves, especially the island’s universities, ought to be aggressive in ensuring that students with disabilities who reach their lecture halls are afforded the best possible environment to succeed. UTech’s financial constraints notwithstanding, should, as a presumed technology-centred institution, be at the forefront of this effort.

It is surprising, therefore, that, at least with respect to signing for the deaf, the university appears not to be on the cutting edge. In 2014, a UTech team, led by Paul Golding, professor of management and information systems, launched a software to help deaf students in understanding the use of prepositions and conjunctions in the English language, which was said to be a deficit in signing for the deaf in Jamaica, and a major contributor to the failure of Jamaican hearing-impaired students at English at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams. UTech would have been expected to have expanded on that project for application in at least its own facilities.

Hopefully, research and development of this type will become UTech’s focus under its new chancellor, Lloyd Carney, the Jamaican-American technology entrepreneur and corporate honcho, should he accept as his mandate bringing UTech back to core and transforming it into an elite R&D-driven polytechnic.

At the same time, Jamaica’s education system has to ensure that Celine Lobban, and the students with disabilities of whatever kind, who matriculate to university and graduate, do not warrant attention on the front pages of newspapers. In that regard, access and inclusiveness have to be assured for children with disabilities (CWD) at all stages of education.

PROBLEMS

The problems of Jamaica’s education systems are widely known and publicly analysed, although not with respect to how it is stacked against CWDs. Current data are not available. However, a 2020 UNESCO analysis, using data from Jamaica’s 2011 census, found that with respect to enrolment, children aged five to 17 with disabilities were five times more likely not to attend school than those without disabilities – 27 per cent and five per cent, respectively. Of those who attended, children with disabilities were nearly twice as likely than those without disabilities to record absences over the five-day school week.

At the time of that census, high school was the highest level of education reached by 63 per cent of Jamaicans without disabilities. However, only 10 per cent of children with disabilities completed secondary schooling.

Further, UNESCO quoted a 2015 study by the Planning Institute of Jamaica, which not only confirmed the generally poor education outcome for CWDs, but found that only 5.6 per cent of children with disabilities, having graduated high school over the previous five years, continued to tertiary level. Fewer than a fifth gained full-time employment. The Jamaica Association for the Deaf reported that 75 per cent of deaf children who left high school gained no marketable skills.

That this happens is not because people with disability are inherently incapable or stupid. It is mostly because they live in a society that has not learned to be inclusive and to tap the talents of those they perceive to be ‘other’. Much human talent goes to waste.

As the Patterson Commission noted, “the concept of an inclusive education is important as it allows for the full engagement of all students, including those with disabilities or learning challenges”. It added, “Importantly, there must be an assessment of a child with a delay or disability at the earliest age possible. There should also be a system of coordinated services that promote a child’s growth and development during the critical early years of life.”

These are not things Jamaica’s policymakers have not heard before. They must now get it done.