August 3, 2018

In Dantewada, Saksham is helping students with special overcome disability

Disability in any form can be overcome with an idea, and armed with this belief, the Dantewada district administration has set up Saksham - a barrier-free residential education unit for children with special needs.

Saksham was conceptualised as an effort to address the barriers to education for children with special needs. It caters to 181 students in-house, and was established in 2014. It also provides learning material for training and intervention programmes for children with special needs. Officials said Saksham 1, for boys, and Saksham 2, for girls, do not only focus on providing therapy and special education, but aim to facilitate education. The key objective is to equalise opportunities for children with special needs, and to set a standard in equitable education and facilitate their schooling with appropriate study aids and materials.

 Impressed with the concept of a barrier-free school, President Ram Nath Kovind recently visited Saksham, and interacted with students during his two-day visit to Chhattisgarh. 

According to officials, the administration has also recruited a team of physiotherapists to meet the teaching and other needs of children with special needs. An occupational therapist has also been roped in to help promote the health and well-being of these children, while a speech therapist helps them sharpen their communication skill. The speech therapist also gives speech and language therapy to children with mental retardation through verbal and non-verbal - sign language, facial expressions – means of communication and provides Auditory Verbal Therapy (AVT) to children with hearing impairment. 

 An official said that vocational trainers help the school staff provide appropriate vocational skills, while special educators work as classroom teachers. The school building has several facilities, including a physiotherapy unit, an audiometry unit, a speech therapy unit, an occupational therapy unit, specially designed disability-wise classrooms, a computer lab with speech reading software, and a library with braille books and a braille typewriter.

To make it easier for children with disabilities, the school has a ramp with hand rails, accessible toilets, sign boards with big letters, information in braille, auditory and visual signals, and wheel chairs, while the classrooms have wider desks. All teaching materials and charts use Braille, and audio-visual aids, and the switches in the classroom are located at a lower level for easy accessibility. All furniture is specially designed to for children with developmental disabilities.

With customised assistive devices and mobility aids, the children at Saksham are learning to do many tasks independently, while skilled faculty members are actively engaging them in vocational skills and ensuring assistance of vocational training to start small scale industries for sustainable self-employment.

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