BHUBANESWAR: The State Government has decided in principle to open 137 more special schools for children with special needs.
Presiding over a high level meeting at the Secretariat here, Chief Secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi on Monday directed the Department for Social Security and Empowerment of Persons with Disability to take steps for appointment of trained teachers for these schools.
Currently, the State has 15 special BEd colleges to train teachers to enable them to understand various methods and approaches of organising education of children with physical and intellectual disability and promote spiritual, personal and professional development of these students within a supportive and challenging environment.
The Chief Secretary directed the Department to take support of experts, voluntary and non-Governmental organisations having expertise in handling children with profound special needs.
The new special schools will be in addition to the existing 92 functioning in the State. Of the existing schools, 51 are being financed by the State Government while the remaining 41 are getting Central assistance.
Padhi asked the Department to submit proposal, if needed, to the State Government for establishment of new teacher training centres to meet the requirement of for the proposed special schools. He emphasised on introducing new curricula to meet special needs of the children.
As per 2011 Census, the State has a total of 12,44,402 differently-abled persons. They include 2,63,799 visually impaired, 2,37,858 hearing impaired, 68,517 speech impaired, 2,59,899 orthopaedically impaired, 72,399 mentally retarded, 42,837 persons with mental illness, 1,26,212 with multiple disability and 1,72,881 with other disabilities.
About 40,078 children have been covered under Banishree Scholarship, 2,135 under Pre-Matric Scholarship and 773 under Post-Matric Scholarship.
Besides, the Government is providing school uniforms to students in the special schools and free laptops along with voice recorder to some of them.
Facebook comments