Public school teacher workshop

We recently had a three afternoon workshop for public school teachers, at the request of the local public school district. It was basically an orientation to deafness. One of the recent issues in deaf education here has been the new buzz word "inclusion." In a developed country, it means that everyone is allowed in the classroom, and you include the necessary aides, interpreters, and specialists. Here, what it means is that you open the door, push the special ed student in, and close the door. He is now officially "included."

The teachers had a lot of complaining to do. "They expect us to work with a full class (30 or more) of the children we already worked with PLUS kids who are blind, deaf, unable to walk, mentally challenged...having any kind of special needs in their education." These teachers not only don't have the training for this, they don't even get so much as a teacher's aide, or a planning hour!

While there are some children previously excluded who will do fine in the regular education classroom, when it comes to deaf children, putting these kids in a class with hearing children simply dooms them to failure. Worse than just academic failure; they probably never even learn a language at all, as they are isolated from Sign Language, and they don't have speech therapy.

So a lot of what our workshop was about was telling them how it was not a good idea to have deaf children in their classroom, and to send them to us! But that if they must have them, here are a few tips. (Don't talk to the class while you are writing on the board, etc.)

A visit to Elias Piña followed on the heels of that workshop. Elias Piña is right on the Haitian-Dominican border. You can throw a rock to Haiti from a few blocks away from the house I stayed in. There are lots of deaf kids. According to the deaf in the capital, the deaf in EP don't know Sign Language.

I visited a family with a five year old son who is deaf. There is no school for deaf children in EP. His parents don't want to send him away to the capital at five years old. They want to learn to communicate with him, but there is no one available to teach them how to Sign.

I worked with them for a few days on Cued Spanish, knowing that they could learn that on their own in much less time, if necessary. But it is a difficult situation any way you look at it.