What’s Next?
Samuel has three options for his education path. His mother can send him to occupational therapy, a private school specifically for differently abled children like him, or a regular or “mainstream” school that integrates differently abled children along with neurotypical children.
Special Educators vs Occupational Therapists
Special educators
In a private or mainstream school, Samuel would be taught by special educators, people who specialize in teaching differently abled children.
Sujatha Sriram is a special educator who works at multiple schools for children ages three to 18. She counsels people 10 to 40-years old.
Sriram works with children who have cerebral palsy, low vision, mental retardation, Down syndrome, autism and specific learning disabilities like dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, and dyspraxia.
“I also work with children who have ADHD hyperactivity disorder - attention deficit hyperactivity disorder - and autism spectrum, Asperger's, Tourette's syndrome,” Sriram listed out.
Sujatha Sriram
She works with differently abled children by using various resources and teaching methods such as using sight words and augmentative alternative communication.
Sriram’s colleague at Montfort Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Sathya Anand, said she became a special educator after her son was diagnosed with autism.
Anand said that back then, there wasn’t anyone available to help her or give advice about raising a son with autism. She faced a lot of challenges on her own, in the dark. But feeling alone led her to be an example and support for other mothers of children with autism.
“So as far as I am concerned, when it comes to me, it's a passion,” Anand said. “What all I went through, I don't want the parents to go through now.”
Occupational Therapists
What Sriram and Anand do is different from what occupational therapist Shibila Anbumani does.
Anbumani works with children who have difficulty reading, struggles with day-to-day activities, bad handwriting, odd sleep routines, and more, as opposed to working solely with a child’s academic areas like special educators do.
“I see the child as a whole,” Anbumani said. “Like in which area, like in cognitive area, like suppose, attention disability, or concentration, or higher functions like problem solving, everything.”
Part of Anbumani’s job is starting interventions with children as early as possible. If a child is born premature or with Erb’s Palsy, they’re at risk of developing a physical disability. So Anbumani calls the parents of the child every month or two to keep track of the child, following up on their developmental milestones.
She even has the ability to make a child smile.
Children need to start smiling by a particular age, Anbumani said, because that’s one of their milestones. If that smiling is delayed, then she can suspect that the child may have autism and start early intervention.
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According to Australian parenting website Raising Children, smiles are the first building blocks of healthy relationships, through which children learn how to think, understand, communicate and show emotions.
She tells the parents to use techniques like getting down to their kid’s eye level when talking and interacting with them in order to make them smile.
“For normal child, we'll stand and say hi, hello, and go side with them,” Anbumani said. “But these children who are not looking at you, or smiling, we used to tell them like, 'Go to the child's level and smile and talk. Whenever you feed them, make them sit face-to-face.’ There are some small strategies we use to teach them from the small age itself.”
Sending a child to occupational therapy is often the first option parents of differently abled children consider, according to Anbumani.
What did Boaz do?
Boaz said she put Samuel in occupational therapy to improve his grip of a pencil, which she said corrected some things. Samuel had some hyperactive behaviors too, when he was younger, but that disappeared as he got older.
She even put him in a special school for two years, but the teachers at the special school told her that there’s no place for Samuel there because he was “normal”.
“So it's kind of he fit in neither here nor there,” Boaz said.
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Special Schools vs Mainstream Schools
When it comes to deciding whether a differently abled child goes to a special school or a mainstream school, there isn’t a lot of choice given to the children. The parents decide for them, Sriram said.
If a child suffers from “profound disabilities”, as Sriram put it, parents prefer to put their child in a special school because they offer a secure environment where the parents can monitor their child .
“But in some cases when a child has a learning disability and when the child has autism but is verbal,” Sriram said, “above 15 years there are few children who would say ‘Can I go to a mainstream school? Why should I study in a learning center?’ So there are few kids, but mostly in India the choice is decided by the parents.”
However, unless a child is severely dysfunctional due to the degree of their disabilities, parents like to put their children in a mainstream school because that’s what’s normal.
According to Jayanthi Kannan, who runs D.K.’s Learning Center out of her home for differently abled children, parents often force their children into mainstream schools when they really belong in a special school.
“So I know a child who was mentally challenged,” Kannan said. “He would not even perform his daily activities. But somehow they have put him in a normal stream. And they also gave him a scribe and got him to pass 10th standard.”
When the parents came to Kannan, he was in his 12th standard. Kannan urged them not to put him back in a mainstream school. She said her advice wasn’t heeded however, and the parents put their son in a mainstream school and got him to pass his 12th standard exams thanks to a scribe who knew all the answers for him.
“So he has passed his 12th,’ she said. “Now they are in a dilemma where to put the child. Because he cannot perform, so how can he go to college? What skills has he acquired? So the parents are in a dilemma now.”
Kannan said that although parents prefer sending their children to a mainstream school so that they can be included among neurotypical children and be taught academics, she feels like parents need to sometimes understand that acquiring skills in order to lead an independent life is more important for the children. For children who can’t cope even with the customized syllabus in a mainstream school, a special school where they can at least acquire life skills while studying subjects under the National Institute of Open Schooling, or NIOS, would seem like the better option.
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Most children who go to D.K.’s Learning Center have gone to a mainstream school, Kannan said, but they don’t always stay there permanently.
“Some parents will understand the child as early as first grade, and they bring the child here,” Kannan said. “So we are able to really show good results with the child. And then put him back in the mainstream also.”
Samuel eventually did go to a mainstream school that integrated differently abled children into the school among neurotypical children. He was able to study with a modified syllabus tailored to his needs and then under the NIOS syllabus later on.