The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion launched its first fo­cused con­sul­ta­tion for the in­clu­sive School Pro­gramme (ISP) yes­ter­day which would fo­cus on a frame­work for pro­vid­ing re­quired at­ten­tion for spe­cial need stu­dents in the na­tion’s schools.

The first phase of the pro­gram would be im­ple­ment­ed in two pri­ma­ry schools and one sec­ondary school in each of the ed­u­ca­tion­al dis­tricts in the coun­try.

How­ev­er, the pres­i­dent of the Con­sor­tium of Dis­abil­i­ty Or­gan­i­sa­tions (CO­DO), Jacqui Leo­taud, said she is con­cerned that the min­istry may be for­get­ting a key de­mo­graph­ic.

“In my mind, pre-school chil­dren do not see a dis­abil­i­ty, they see a dif­fer­ence. They say what’s wrong with your foot? Oh okay, that’s okay and they go along. The preschool kids, then they move in­to the prep schools and the pri­ma­ry schools and they’re grow­ing up with kids with dis­abil­i­ties. To me, this process has to start there,” Leo­taud told Guardian Me­dia be­fore the min­istry en­tered in­to the con­sul­ta­tion.

Asked how she felt about the in­tro­duc­tion of this pro­gramme to cater to spe­cial needs stu­dents she said, “Well I think it’s ex­treme­ly late - now I look at it from the point of view of pri­vate schools okay...this pro­pos­al was de­vel­oped ten years ago so it’s tak­en 10 years to reach this stage but change takes a long time.”

Al­so weigh­ing in, PRO of Dis­abled Peo­ples’ In­ter­na­tion­al Ker­win Thomas said he hopes the gov­ern­ment holds true with their promis­es about what the project aims to de­liv­er.

“For me per­son­al­ly as a dif­fer­ent­ly-abled per­son and speak­ing for per­sons who are dif­fer­ent­ly able, we would like to see these qual­i­ties or these words that were ex­pressed are not just words that would be sound­ing good in the ear...but def­i­nite­ly some­thing that can be con­crete and be im­ple­ment­ed so that we can be able to see the fruits of this.”

Man­ag­er of Stu­dent Sup­port Ser­vices, Den­nis Con­rad told the var­i­ous stake­hold­ers and NGO’s present that through the con­sul­ta­tion and the ISP, they hope to cre­ate “a mod­el that is rel­e­vant to us in Trinidad and To­ba­go”.

Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion An­tho­ny Gar­cia ex­plained to the stake­hold­ers that “The goal at the be­gin­ning of the project will be to re­fine and un­der­stand what works and what doesn’t work be­fore a new in­take of stu­dents for the 2020-2021 aca­d­e­m­ic year.”

Gar­cia said, “We will mea­sure, eval­u­ate and mon­i­tor the strengths, weak­ness­es, suc­cess­es and fail­ures that oc­cur dur­ing that time and pre­pare the nec­es­sary ad­just­ments to wel­come new stu­dents.”