Inclusion key to educating disabled children - president

The Daily Gleaner –Friday June 6th, 2008
JON PICKETT

A new training program will help pre-school workers improve their work with disabled children.

Education: From left, Dixie Mitchell, Each Child Matters co-author; Edith Doucet, Social Development Department assistant deputy minister; and Danny Soucy, Each Child Matters co-author, discuss inclusive education.

Every Child Matters was released by the New Brunswick Association for Community Living on Thursday. The guide took two years to complete.

It has 10 modules: five address the purpose and benefits of inclusion, and five deal with ways to include children with disabilities into activities.

The program will be made available to all child-care workers in the province.

"What the program provides is not only knowledge and information, but strategies," said Dixie Mitchell, co-author of the guide.

"We never work in such a way that we say, 'A child with Down syndrome needs this, or a child with autism needs this.' What the guide actually does is look at all children; looks at ways which you can individually, through a lens, see the child for who he is, why he is, what he does and then work with the strengths he has."

Association president Marlene Munn said she knows the positive effects inclusion has on youngsters. Her daughter Aimee Hughes, 9, has Down syndrome and spent two years at the University of New Brunswick's pre-school.

"It was a big benefit just for her to be around the other kids and learn stuff from them and follow their routines, learn to be in a classroom and all that good stuff," Munn said.

When Aimee started school, there were a lot of familiar and understanding students in her class.

"Once she started school, a lot of the same kids were in the school, so it made the transition a lot easier. They were really good about talking to the other kids about Aimee and helping her get used to the new place," Munn said.

The association designed the training program in response to requests by child-care centres all over the province. Mitchell said the program will help fix the lack of training resources for inclusion.

"Ten years ago, early childhood educators were asking 'Why include children with disabilities in our program?' Now they ask 'How can we better include all children in our programs?' We hope this will help them with both the why and the how," Mitchell said.

Child-care workers can register for the courses, which will start in September.