All schools should be transformed to handle children with disabilities

Children with disabilities are automatically disadvantaged as institutions are not properly equipped to facilitate them. These children are no less capable than children without disabilities and should be given equal opportunities to learn. 

Disability and education reform

22 Dec 2022

THERE IS bittersweet in the story published by this newspaper on Monday about the bookbinding business run by the Jamaica Association for the Deaf (JAD), with support from the European Union (EU). The company, JAD Binders, rebinds books and fashions paper-based souvenirs from recycled paper manufactured by its employees, who, primarily, are hearing-impaired.

So, JAD Binders is, on the face of it, good for the environment. By recycling, it saves trees that absorb greenhouse gases and, presumably, also contributes to a lessening of Jamaica’s carbon footprint. Importantly, too, are the employment opportunities the business opens for deaf people – mostly young ones.

“It (the business and the expansion into papermaking) is an excellent opportunity to upskill our deaf individuals and provide an opportunity for them to explore new and reusable methods of binding,” said the JAD’S executive director, Kimberly Marriott-blake.

That’s the sweet bit: jobs and skills in an environment where they are not plentiful for people with disabilities, including those who are hearingimpaired. In addition to the discrimination they face in the labour market, people with physical disabilities also generally start with a deficit in education.

As we noted in these columns recently, up-to-date data on the educational achievements of people with disabilities are not readily available.

But a 2020 analysis by UNESCO, using decade-old census data, showed that children age five to 17 who have disabilities were five times more likely not to attend school than able-bodied children. Indeed, in 2011, nearly three in 10 (27 per cent) of children with a single or multiple disabilities mostly did not attend school. And of those who attended school, they were nearly twice as likely to be absent than other children over the five-day school week.

While six of 10 Jamaicans who do not suffer from disabilities completed their education at high school, only one in 10 with disabilities did so. Additionally, a survey by the Planning Institute of Jamaica seven years ago found that over the previous five years, only 5.6 per cent of students with disabilities who graduated high school went on to tertiary education or training.

The JAD found that 75 per cent of hearing-impaired students who completed high school and entered the job market had no marketable skills. Which further amplifies the value of a project like the bookbinding and papermaking enterprise.

Obviously, bookbinding, papermaking and the other jobs done at JAD Binders require relatively high levels of skill and technical competence. But the business was established by the JAD and supported by the EU not purely because it was a potentially profitable enterprise answering to a market need. It is in part social enterprise – a response to the employment needs of deaf people, the inadequacy of skills they possess to directly compete in a labour market, and the discrimination they are likely to encounter from the people who make decisions on hiring.

This, of course, relates to the deep problems of Jamaica’s system, with its poor outcomes, which are widely known and often discussed. But the data relating to children with disabilities highlight an even more profound crisis that is in need of urgent attention.

TACKLE DISCRIMINATION

The answer cannot be primarily welfare-oriented projects, such as the JAD’S bindery, as good and important as these are.

First, Jamaica has to frontally attack the discrimination faced by people with disabilities. The promulgation of the new Disabilities Act, more than seven years after its passage, is a start. It must now be robustly enforced.

At the same time, it is crucial that Jamaica mainstream education for children with disabilities, simultaneously with a campaign snuffing out a lingering presumption that being hearing-impaired or blind, or possessing some other physical disability automatically confers a deficit in intellect. A major engagement of the population on this issue is warranted.

And schools must be kitted out to properly accommodate children with disabilities, rather than treating them as ‘other’. A deaf student with ambitions of becoming a computer technician should not feel that she has to settle for less because the school she attends places her on a pathway to a social enterprise.

Cases like that of Celine Lobban must urgently become a thing of the past. Ms Lobban graduated from the University of Technology (Utech) last month with a bachelor’s degree in computer studies. The process was not easy.

Ms Lobban is deaf. She had to employ her own interpreter for lectures. She often felt lonely in classes where there was no one else with a disability.

These are among the issues that should be at the heart of the discussion of the Patterson Commission’s report on transforming the education system, which, unfortunately, has not been subjected by the Government to serious debate. As it now stands, Jamaicans have no claim to ownership of anything of that report, which the Government has placed on track for implementation. People know little about what is in the document. That is untenable.

 

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