With the “zero reject” policy, any parent can enroll their children in public schools – even SPED pupils. Unfortunately, not all public schools in the country has a SPED center, or at least a SPED program. “Every school should have a program for SPED, kasi lahat ng bata, makikita mo sa lahat ng eskwelahan ,” Department of Education (DepEd) SPED division chief Mirla Olores.
Citing an estimate from the World Health Organization, Olores said children with special needs comprise 15% of the population in a given community. Back in 2012, they were estimated to be more or less 13% of the country’s youth and children, with only 2% receiving government support.
But today, only 416 SPED centers nationwide are funded by the government, with 4 more waiting for recognition. Aside from this, Olores estimated around 200 public schools offer a SPED program, but without a center. That is 620 out of 34,000 public elementary schools nationwide – a long way to go, obviously, for special education in the Philippines. Based on enrollment alone, there are 239,000 SPED pupils in public elementary schools today, and only 6,000 pure SPED teacher-items.
But since the ultimate goal of special education is the child’s integration or “mainstreaming” into regular school – and eventually, in the community – Olores said every teacher should have an orientation in special education. “What teachers call stupidity is actually a specific disability. As the teacher writes on the board, and the letters seem to be dancing for the child with reading disability, the teacher might brand him as stupid. That is why all teachers must know SPED. ” she said.
The Essay on The Realities of School Choice in Public Education
With the increasing demand for better schools, states and communities are providing more options to families. By doing so, they are not only improving educational opportunities for children, but also having a dramatic impact on how schools operate. School choice options are: publicly funded school choice program, charter schools, magnet school and private scholarship programs. Armed with the ...
The Department of Education (DepEd) said it wants to achieve a similar feat of effectively honing students with special needs. In a statement, Education Secretary Armin Luistro announced the government has hiked its budget subsidy for special children or those with learning disabilities. For the new school year that begins in June, Luistro said the DepEd has increased the budget subsidy for elementary Special Education (Sped) centers by 56% to P180- M. He said the DepEd has also increased the number of its Sped centers to 345 for school year 2012-2013, from 276 in the previous school year.
Based on DepEd data, children with special needs comprise more or less 13% of the Philippines’ youth and children. Various estimates show only around 2% of them currently receives government support. The government faces the Mark Kevin Aguilar IV-BSMT November 6, 2014 challenge of keeping them in school alongside perennial problems like improving the basic education curriculum and increasing the number of schools and classrooms. “We believe that special learners deserve special attention and specialized learning tools, thus the increase in funding support,” Luistro explained. Luistro, a former president of the De La.
Salle University, also instructed school officials to purchase instructional materials “to develop the gifted child’s intellectual abilities and talents,” such as softwares, DVDs, and other audio and video tapes. Governments should empower persons with disabilities and remove the barriers that prevent them from receiving quality education, among other things, said the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank (WB) in a joint report late last year.
In his preface to the report, world-famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking stressed the world’s “moral duty to remove the barriers to participation and to invest sufficient funding and expertise to unlock the vast potential of people with disabilities. ” “Governments throughout the world can no longer overlook the hundreds of millions of people with disabilities who are denied access to health, rehabilitation, support, education, and employment, and never get the chance to shine,” Hawking said. In special education, it is not only government funding that matters, however.
The Term Paper on Special Education: Exceptional Children in the Classroom
Abstract Instructional practice designed to be effective in the mainstream-inclusion classroom environment must be one that is readily adaptable yet one that is sensible in its’ application in this unique and exceptional classroom setting. Although there are complications and difficulties inherent in teaching in this environment the ultimate rewards, as well as the daily ones are motivational and ...
In an interview before the Aquino administration took over, then DepEd Special Education Chief Mirla Olores said few special children go to school partly because “parents tend to hide their children with disabilities out of embarrassment. ” A number of parents, on the other hand, cite poverty as a reason for not sending special children to school. “We need intensive advocacy programs to encourage parents of differently-able children to send them to special education classes,” Olores said. References: http://www. rappler. com/nation/3523-special-kids-get-higher-deped-budget.
http://www. rappler. com/move-ph/issues/education/51277-long-way-special-education http://www. rappler. com/business/62189-provinces-low-revenues-education-services.
