Right mix of human element, technology needed

Carl Gilchrist, Gleaner Writer

OCHO RIOS, St Ann:

IMPROVING TEACHER training, greater use of technology, reducing class sizes, and a more cohesive and inclusive approach are some of the areas authorities should be targeting in order to get Jamaica's education system on the right track.

Those were the recommendations put forward by participants at the recent special education conference in Ocho Rios, St Ann.

More than 400 participants from the Caribbean spent two days discussing a wide-range of topics aimed at enhancing special education. Among them was Dr Michele Meredith, coordinator of the Ministry of Education's (MOE) Special Education Project.

"I would want to see a more cohesive approach to how we meet the needs of children with exceptionalities," Dr Meredith said, speaking with regard to special education.

"What I would want to see happening is a careful, strategised plan to identify, categorise and to treat. In addition to that, we want to ensure that the services and the facilities are available to meet the needs of those students as you are able to identify them."

Literacy focus

So far, about 6,000 children with special needs have been identified in Jamaica with approximately 4,625 of them already in specialist schools. It is, however, uncertain how many are in the general school population but with the MOE's soon-to-be-implemented Find Child Initiative, geared at identifying such children, it is expected that a fairer picture would soon be forthcoming.

"That's where we have to start but we're not focusing on literacy because specialist education is not literacy. We will use that information to identify the children who seem to be at risk for failure and then having identified them, we would be in a better state to actually treat them," Meredith explained.

Meanwhile, 30 years after the MOE's Special Education Unit was set up, Dr Polly Bowes-Howell, who has spent nearly five decades in the classroom, is lamenting the slow pace at which action is being taken to correct the deficiencies in the system.

"The unit started in 1981 and, to date, we only have six officers and in over 30 years, we have not done enough to meet the needs of all the children. And when we speak about the (MOE's) mantra - 'Every Child Can Learn, Every Child Must Learn' - just ask yourself, are we reaching every child?"

Bowes-Howell, who chairs both the Association of Persons on Intellectual Disability and the Jamaica Teachers' Association's Special Education Committee, and is the regional dean in charge of early-childhood education at the International University of the Caribbean, argues: "If we're going to address the problem, we have to start at grade one," she said.

The specialist continues: "Move the resources, more resources, into grade-one classrooms. Start the intervention at grade one and sustain it up to grade three because you might not really need that amount of special education. What we need is to provide basic education and we're not able to do that," she said.