Ninety six students with special needs at Karthika Tirunal Government Vocational and Higher Secondary School for Girls, Manacaud, could now look forward to a new learning experience.
With the newly renovated Inclusive Education (IED) resource centre equipped with the latest facilities, the daily two-hour sessions that will focus on these students are expected to make a lot of difference.
The Rs.5 lakh project implemented under a Ministry of Human Resource Development scheme was inaugurated by Minister for Education P.K. Abdu Rabb on Friday.
An amount of Rs.1 lakh has been used to purchase learning materials, including Braille kits, Braille typewriter type writing machines and other aids for visually challenged students.
The centre is equipped with adaptive teaching aids and other learning materials. A computer centre, a television, and a home theatre have also been provided to enable interactive learning.
Indoor training is very important for children suffering from autism and other intellectual disorders. So, it is important to provide a supportive environment for such training that could create visible changes in the way they spend time at the centre.
The adaptive learning aids will be useful not only for children with special needs, but also young children who are interested in coming to the centre, S. Suja, one of the resource teachers at the school, said.
Apart from this, the centre will be equipped with a speech therapy unit for which funds have been allotted. The appointment of a speech therapist has been sanctioned.
Students from other schools could also avail themselves of this facility, IED director R. Rajan told The Hindu .
The school caters to the needs of the special children with the help of three resource teachers. Remedial classes for these children are conducted after school.
This academic year, the school has started a new initiative to provide further assistance to the special children.
As it is not often possible for the resource teachers to sit through the students' class sessions and the class teachers could only allot a limited time to each of them, manual teaching materials will be given to the teachers to make the teaching task easier, S.L. Sreelatha, the resource teacher at the school, said.
This centre will act as the nodal unit for the other IED centres in the city.
Plans are on the anvil to set up a vocational and occupational therapy unit for higher secondary students who had passed out of the school, Mr. Rajan said.
