The Child Care Centre here has come up with a new project, Learning-Friendly Ernakulam District, to train schoolteachers in special methods to help children overcome learning disabilities.
The Child Care Centre is a joint venture of the Indian Academy of Paediatrics, Kochi; District Council for Child Welfare, and the District Administration. The District Collector is its chairman.
Paediatrician Abraham Paul, executive director of Child Care Centre, said the idea is to train one teacher from each school in the district for a full day in methods to identifying and evaluating learning disability and also to implement remedial steps. These teachers in turn would train the rest of the teachers in their schools.
Learning disability
This measure was thought about since children with learning disability were not being identified by teachers or recommended by teachers for remedial measures. Most parents approach the Child Care Centre when the child is past the middle school, even though the symptoms of learning disability can be found in lower primary classes.
While most schools have a resource room special educator, the practical difficulty in identifying learning disability and providing the right support to the child at the right time is still missing. “We hardly get children recommended by teachers,” said Dr. Paul.
First phase
The project will be launched on Friday, and 250 schools out of the 460 schools in the district will be covered in the initial phase. Two classes a month on the first and fourth Friday will be held in batches of 25 teachers. Teachers in each school will be selected as per their experience in learning disability training or as resource room teacher. The District Education Officer will select the teachers for training. Booklets on the topic will be distributed to all teachers in the district through the representatives from each school.
Dr. Paul said that the Child Care Centre usually does not take up cases of children who are brought in by parents when the child reaches Class IX.
The issue of learning disability certificate for getting exemption from the general category in Class X board examinations had in recent years become a scam of sort.
Learning disability is an invisible handicap affecting about 10 per cent of schoolchildren. They have normal or above intelligence, but are unable to perform in class due to faulty brain signals. It may be due to faulty development or inadequate development of parts of brain concerned with skills of reading, writing, spelling, language or arithmetic. The condition often hinders the child to express in writing what he or she had learnt, resulting in poor marks.
