Delhi govt schools to open resource rooms for kids with special needs

According to the new guidelines set up by the DoE on Tuesday, all government schools in the city will follow a fixed timetable for the children with disabilities.

In a first, the government schools in Delhi will soon have “resource rooms” dedicated to providing special education training to children with disabilities (CwD), individually or in a small group. The rooms will be used to provide supplementary education for these children along with regular inclusive classes.

The Directorate of Education (DoE) has asked all the government schools to provide at least one session a day in these resource rooms to children with mild and moderate educational needs and at least two sessions to those having several special needs.

According to the new guidelines set up by the DoE on Tuesday, all government schools in the city will follow a fixed timetable for the children with disabilities. Educators—meant to cater to the needs of children with disabilities—were asked to access the requirement of each and every specially-abled children enrolled in their respective schools, in order to plan their weekly Resource Room Training (RRT) sessions.

As per the inclusive education policy, the children with disabilities should be provided education in classes with those without disabilities. However, with these resource rooms, the students will get a space to receive supplementary help to adjust in the inclusive classrooms.

In an order issued by the DoE director Binay Bushan on Tuesday, the schools were told, “The RRT rooms should be used for teaching basic skills in languages and mathematics, teaching functional skills, teaching-plus-curriculum activities, to develop strategies for children with disabilities to help them cope up with the inclusive class and for clarification of concepts taught by the teachers in inclusive classes.”

Presently, around 20,000 children with disabilities are enrolled across 1,030 government schools across the capital. The special educators are also asked to conduct weekly counselling sessions for the parents of these kids.

The DoE further instructed all the heads of government schools (HoS’) to avoid assigning subject teaching to special educators. “In case if the school does not has any Children with Disabilities enrolled with it currently then the special educators shall be used to conduct thorough screening for the identification of who may have disabilities,” Bushan said in the order.

Disability rights activists Satendra Singh said that giving a comfortable space to the children with disabilities in schools is important. “Many of these children do not get a chance to open up in inclusive classes where they study with children without disabilities. But the government needs to implement in a very strategic way. It does not end up excluding students. This should be only supplementary,” he said.