Karnataka government schools to become disabled-friendly from next academic year

The department of primary and secondary education, in its efforts to make education inclusive, has roped in an organisation to train its teachers.
Karnataka government schools to become disabled-friendly from next academic year

BENGALURU: Government schools in Karnataka are likely to see a welcome change from the next academic year, as efforts are on to make regular schools disabled-friendly.

The department of primary and secondary education has roped in an organisation to train its teachers to mainstream children with a spectrum of physical and learning disabilities. The statewide project called ‘Nanagu Shaale’ (School For Me Too) which is already being piloted in two educational districts of Koppal and Hubli-Dharwad -- will be extended to all 33 educational districts.

The project will be rolled out for about 1200 Block Integrated Education Resource Teachers (BIERT), and up to 6000 teachers in the years to follow, Vishal R, commissioner of Public Instruction told TNIE.

While infrastructure is being worked on to make government schools disabled-friendly, we also need to understand soft infrastructure and a generic approach to a spectrum of disabilities may not help, he added.

Filling vacancies

At present, the BIERT's mandated to take care of children with disabilities in each block. These teachers will be trained with the basics of inclusive education for all children. The department however is short of many teachers, and is said to have just 700 such teachers but is in process of recruiting the remainder for 1224 posts -- six for each of the 204 education blocks.

The  Fourth Wave Foundation which is taking on the project of training is also looking to train Anganwadi teachers and those educators interested in teaching children with disabilities (CWD) to nip the practice of segregating students with disabilities at a young age. They're also looking to work with Village Resource Workers (VRW) and Mandal Resource Workers (MRW) who are mandated not just to identify children with disabilities, but also ensure they are educated.  By this effort, and mechanisms for instance additional classes after regular teaching hours, children with disabilities are likely to be brought into regular schools in a large manner.

"There is a serious gap for enabling inclusion for students with disabilities in our government schools. Either kids are left out of the schooling systems or are referred to special education schools -- the latter is not just enough in numbers in the state but is also not the solution for these children," said Diana Vincent, director of Fourth Wave Foundation, that has created a bridge course to make CWD school-ready and put them in regular schools, to arrest dropouts.

A major lacuna, Diana added, is that teachers don't even know here how inclusion is made possible. "In Europe for instance, inclusion is just an ordinary process where they have a special teacher and children come to regular classrooms and take an extra set of classes for their coping mechanisms." Now with the training, teachers will be equipped with similar mechanisms.

This streamlining of CWD in regular schools also falls in line with NEP as the policy has no place for special schools and says that every child will belong to a local/village school, said Diana.

The training is expected to start in January for six months, and recurring training will continue for three years.

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