KINGSTON, Jamaica. The Salvation Army School for the Blind is having to turn away children who need it because it does not have the staff to care for them, its guidance counsellor has warned, and he says the school is at risk of breaching the Disabilities Act as a result.
Sean Harvey raised the alarm at a back-to-school consultation hosted by the Jamaica Council for Persons with Disabilities and the Ministry of Labour and Social Security at the Abilities Foundation in St Andrew, where teachers, students and members of the disabled community spoke plainly about what they face.
Over the past twenty years, Mr Harvey said, roughly seven of every ten students the school receives have more than one disability. The school was not designed or staffed for that, and a child must be toilet trained to attend. The State’s provision of shadows for children with additional needs helps, he said, but does not reach a child from rural Jamaica. Each year the school writes to the education ministry for more teachers and support staff; he argues the standard student-to-staff ratio simply does not fit a special school, and that support should follow each child’s needs rather than a single formula.
He also called for children with disabilities to receive the full range of benefits under the PATH programme, not only the health component, pointing to the far higher cost of educating a blind child. A braille machine costs in the region of US$800, so many students have one at school and nothing at home.
Transport was the other sore point. Therese Braham of the Abilities Foundation said the single special-service bus carrying students to schools in Papine and Gordon Town is dangerously overcrowded every morning and asked for a second. A teacher at the Lister Mair Gilby School for the Deaf appealed for the school’s broken security fence to be repaired, and a worker from Hope Valley Experimental School described a wheelchair user who cannot take up his place at Mavis Bank High because the school has no ramps.
Labour and Social Security Minister Pearnel Charles Jr, who attended, said the point of the consultation was to turn dialogue into action, whether new legislation, amended law or policy, to address what the community raised.
LRTVS News Desk
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