Parents battling special education hurdle
Home learning a challenge for with children with disabilities
NAVIGATING THE online education world during the coronavirus pandemic is not an easy feat for many parents. For those whose children have learning or physical disabilities with illnesses such as autism and cerebral palsy, it can be a seriously confounding venture.
Children with disabilities have a much harder time coping with changes in their routines. For them, a break from physical classes at school is more than a loss in academic lessons; it is also a blight on their long-term emotional and psychosocial development, educators say.
“I really try, but it is just for a short time, and it is not working out for me,” said Patricia Smith, one of many parents across the island who have had to be supervising their children’s lessons as schools were ordered closed six weeks ago to help stem the spread of the novel coronavirus locally.
A resident of Portmore Pines in St Catherine – the parish which has recorded the most cases locally and is currently under a lockdown – Smith told The Sunday Gleaner that it has been no simple feat trying to guide her 11-year-old son, who functions at the grade-one level, through his lessons.
“I focus mostly on reading, and since I have been home under lockdown, I would start around 10 a.m. with him, but I cannot get more than an hour out of him,” Smith said, almost coming to tears.
“I just don’t have the skills to teach him,” added the mother, whose child was born premature and, as a result, developed learning disabilities.
The preteen, who attends a preparatory school in Portmore, also requires a constant ‘shadow teacher’ while at school, but the pandemic has brought that familiar structure to an abrupt end.
“When there is no routine, they just want to do their own thing. They tend to listen more to the teacher,” she explained, adding that pent-up frustration from indoor confinement has also started to take a toll on her son and his 16-year-old brother, who is well.
CRITICAL ROLE
Ruthlyn James, founding director of the Adonijah Group of Schools, which caters to mentally challenged students from age two to 34, said the disruption in routine for such pupils may have long-term implications.
Parents, she explained, are crucial to stemming such, but they often lack the patience and skills to keep children on task at home. In light of this, the school has been distributing teaching resources to some parents.
“A lot of parents don’t have the same resources that are in schools, particularly special-needs schools, as it is mainly tangible, hands-on, manipulative objects that are required for carrying across learning objectives,” she said.
Principal Elesha Beckford said the school has also been seeking counsellors and speech and development therapists to conduct online sessions with parents to help them cope as they try to foster their children’s development.
For now, they encourage parents to use household items.
“Peanut butter, straws, whistles to help facilitate movement of the tongue, and so forth,” James explained, “everyday items around the house that can help with their oral and motor development.”
Still, the parents are anxious for the COVID-19 nightmare to end so that official schooling can resume.
Hellshire, St Catherine resident Suzan McKenzie, whose 10-yearold daughter is autistic and has a heart condition, explained that she has also been struggling.
“Sometimes you will be teaching her and she just drifts out of it, so you have to give her time. And it doesn’t make sense you rough her up because even if you do, she is still not moving,” said McKenzie, who added that her daughter asks for her teachers constantly.
Christine Staple-Ebanks, founder of the Nathan Ebanks Foundation, an advocacy group for disabled children, said many parents like herself have been under dire stress since the coronavirus outbreak locally. Her son has cerebral palsy and is non-verbal.
“It is more than just school closing down because Nathan and children like him fit in the very vulnerable population of persons with [underlying] medical issues [which could cause adverse outcomes if they contract] COVID-19.
“As a result, we’ve had to isolate ourselves and we’ve had to let go of the caregiver. That goes for a lot of parents of children with special needs,” she said, adding that since her son has been home she has not been able to work.
While data on the number of students locally with learning difficulties is not readily available, the website of the Jamaican Association on Intellectual Disabilities, which has a network of five main schools along with satellite units across the island, says its student population, which ranges from six to 21 years, is 1,400.
Many students with undiagnosed learning disabilities are enrolled in the regular school system.
Last year, the Mico CARE Centre disclosed in a special Gleaner feature that it gets roughly 3,500 requests for assessments annually, of which it was able to handle 2,500 in 2018. It said that 75 per cent of the students were boys.