Creating an Environment of Inclusion

“Creating Centers of Excellence for the Inclusive Education of Children with Special Needs” is the title of a new TACIS partnership program, whose aim is to guarantee children with special needs their right to equal access to quality education. During their presentation, program representatives spoke about their experiment to include children with special needs in the public school system. The experiment has yielded wonderful results: 78 mentally or physically challenged children aged from five to twelve have successfully adapted at 27 schools in Ukraine’s seven oblasts. Many specially trained professionals have worked to achieve this result, among them teachers, school administrators, and grassroots representatives. Children have been the central focus of this experiment: 712 schoolchildren in various school communities welcomed 78 children with serious health disorders. Experts point out that after one year in the same classroom children with special needs are 30% more likely to initiate contacts and socialize with their peers than before, while for healthy children this figure is 45%. Children from both categories have mastered the art of self-expression, and experts point to positive socioemotional changes in their attitude. Healthy schoolchildren have become friendlier and more tolerant, and their expressions of mutual respect and compassion have become more frequent. Meanwhile, their mentally or physically challenged peers have made significant advances in revealing their creative potentials, mastering school subjects, and developing physically.

Yet even such positive results do not mean that this program can be immediately introduced in the system of mass education. This program is not acceptable either as an alternative to mass education or as a way to diversify it. The main problem is providing children with developmental disorders with a so-called correctional block without which their presence in mass schools is utterly meaningless. The essence of integration is in providing such a correctional block.

Integration comes in several forms: complete, partial, and combined, whereby a child with special needs spends the whole day at school, attends selected classes, or only takes part in extracurricular activities. Vyacheslav Zasenko, deputy director of the Social Pedagogy Institute, believes that we have yet to determine via experimentation what categories of children with developmental disorders will better absorb knowledge if provided with a correctional block. It is not that easy to create such a block. For children with orthopedic disorders the design of public schools has to be changed by adding wheelchair ramps, remodeling bathrooms, etc. Those with impaired hearing need sign language interpreters, while blind children need Braille books, which have never been developed for the mass school system, only for specialized boarding schools. One must also bear in mind the fact that every tenth parent of a healthy child disapproves of his offspring sharing a classroom with children suffering from developmental disorders. Moreover, public school budgets have no additional funds to hire handicapped specialists or social workers.

Ukraine currently has over 400 specialized boarding schools, 239 of which are for children with mental disorders, 6 for the blind, 22 for the deaf, 29 for children with vision disorders, and 27 for children with impaired hearing, which cater to the educational needs of nearly 70,000 children. Meanwhile, some 60,000 children with developmental disorders attend mass schools courtesy of their parents. Yet far from every special child can be painlessly integrated into the environment of a mass school. For some this is impossible because of their mental or physical condition, others have their individual peculiarities, while some children may prove socially dangerous in an environment of healthy peers.

Experts unanimously agree that the model of integrated education should be further developed and implemented. In the meantime, the number of schools that are prepared to welcome children with serious health disorders into their community of healthy children will increase gradually. Project participants see their next step in creating resource and training centers, whose task will be to disseminate this positive experience in all of Ukraine’s regions.