Special Children need Special Provisions
That great difficulty in crossing a small step takes away access to lots of spaces for special children. Though they want to avail themselves of the resources in their educational institutions, the lack of facilities makes them idle. “I want to go to the library along with my peers to get books. But, it hurts people like me with an extra leg”, said Padma(16 years old), a differently-abled student. Unlike the other children, differently-abled need some provisions for accessing spaces and relevant resources to cope up with their academics too.
As per the Right to Education Act and Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, differently-abled people can get that equality in rights when they also can access every resource in their educational institutions like other students. Most of them are not well equipped with providing a friendly environment for differently-abled within the campuses, until now. There are only a few campuses that are disabled friendly and constructed ramps, toilets that can be accessed by special children. “I couldn’t go to school and get an education owing to reasons like no ramps, no disabled-friendly toilets, a lot of steps to cross, etc. I dropped out of school and my parents searched a lot to find disabled-friendly schools in our region”, said Mani Shankar(12 years old), a special child.
Pandemic has hit disabled students with intolerable challenges . “In class, my friends would help me with reading the concepts and our discussions would make me grasp them easily. But now these pandemic days take away my opportunity to learn along with my peers and I find no one to help me with it”, said Swathi(12 years old), a disabled child with visual impairment. There are a lot of children with visual impairment who are facing much more harder times while coping up with their education. There are some campuses that provide reading material in Braille Scripts but not all across the country. There are few states like Tamil Nadu, Odisha, and Gujarat which made by-laws to construct disabled-friendly spaces that may help them a little in coping up with their survival but not with every crucial activity in their lives.
The institutions should consider the difficulties of differently-abled and construct the campus, arrange the infrastructure accordingly which can provide that inclusivity for every student and make them have their Right to Education. “Not just after special people enter the institutions, we try to help disabled individuals while they are giving entrance examinations by appointing a person who can help with their difficulties”, said Rajagopal, a member of Azim Premji Foundation. He also conveyed that there is the necessity of appointing special educators to deal with special people.
“Unlike other children, my child cannot pay much attention to education because he always wants to play any game like his friends. He is always disappointed with these circumstances and the things going differently for him. This gave him a lot of mental stress and he never let anyone speak regarding other activities. I always hope that his school should have a friendly playground for him”, said the mother of a special child. As everyone knows that physical activities are essential for the body and children are more interested in it, special children also need to play sports for their health and to boost their self-confidence. There are some sports which help better for a specific set of children. For example, a wheelchair-bound child can try swimming which can make them feel the freedom of movement in a few cases. As every child, a special child can also compete in the competitions which helps them to forget their disability at least for a while. Hence, it is important to create a disabled-friendly environment in every field.
In addition to providing accessible resources, educational institutions should have a sufficient number of special educators who can deal with variously disabled children. The curriculum should be sensitive accordingly to the various students in a class. Considering every student, the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment should be designed in such a way where it can met the needs of every student. “The person appointed by the education officer would help me with my annual examinations. I will say the answers to the questions and the one who is helping me will write them. But, I used to get less score than I could because half of the examination time will be used to explain the answers for the person who is writing which never gave me that opportunity to attempt each question. I would feel discouraged when I saw my score in the results”, said Mounika(15 years old) who lost her hands in an accident.
Therefore educators should also consider various children while they teach and provide reading material. There are some passionate special educators who are sending out PowerPoint presentations and customized materials for the disabled to make them inclusive as part of online education. They have made videos explaining courses in sign language that can be accessed by deaf students. There are several screen reading apps/websites like JAWS, NVDA(Windows), ORCA(Linux), Voice Aloud Reader(Android), etc which can help children with visual impairment along with the Braille scripts, who are able to afford devices during these online times of education. Establishing such inclusivity by providing special provisions is essential to ensure equality and protecting the rights of the disabled within every sector. Let every child have their Rights to Education and Equality.
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