The School for Children with Disabilities

We spent two days at the New Horizon School. This is a private school for children with disabilities. Our first day at the school was mainly to tour the school. We met the kids, talked to some of the teachers and saw what their classes and day was like. They had kids with every type of physical and mental disability; there were children with Down’s syndrome, children with microcephaly, cerebral palsy, autism and a variety of other forms of cognitive impairment. One little girl was an interesting case at first she seemed to have spastic cerebral palsy but after spending time with her she seemed to be athetoid, she seemed unable to control her movements. My professor had never seen a case like hers. Since I’ve been back I’ve done some research and found that she most like did have both, it’s called mixed cerebral palsy and happens when there is damage to the pyramidal and extra pyramidal areas of the brain. According to CerebralPalsySource.com about 10 percent of cerebral palsy cases are mixed and about 10 percent of mixed cases are a mixture of spastic and athetoid. At this school there was a physiotherapist. She was a volunteer with an European based international organization that placed her at the school. She seemed to be working very hard to help the children any way she could. She was making custom chairs and standing boards for some of the children using layered cardboard and decoupage to make them look nice. The girl we examined with cerebral palsy had one of these specially made chairs.

After our first day at the school we finally broke out our MacGyver kits. These were kits of potentially useful materials that we could use to adapt objects for easier use by the children at the school. We adapted spoons, and pens/pencils. We worked for several hours that evening trying to come up with every possible useful adaptation we could leave for the children. Then the next morning we had a seminar for all of the teachers and some aids to show them what we’d come up with. We showed them how useful simple sticky cupboard lining could be to help children keep what they are working on in place. We also showed them proper techniques for lifting and moving the children that couldn’t walk so that the caretakers wouldn’t hurt themselves or the children. Unfortunately, I have a neck injury and am not allowed to lift so I used a classmate’s camera to take pictures during this section. Everyone seemed very interested in what we had to offer. We can only hope that some of the things we gave them were useful and that they are still using some of what we taught them. We can’t help but be haunted by something the physiotherapist said to us. She said we were “getting a good show”. In other words the teachers and aides were paying attention and asking questions but that wasn’t how they were normally. She said she would make something for a child to help with positioning then go into the classroom the next day and find that they weren’t using it. She was obviously working very hard at the school to do what she could for the children but also was frustrated at the lack of follow through. Maybe we reinforced some of what she was telling them; maybe having outsiders from two different countries saying similar things will help them believe what they are told. I hope that our limited time at the school helped her to be even more effective working with the children and teachers.

Leaving the New Horizon School I couldn’t help but think of Lizzy, the little girl with Down’s syndrome that we had met in the village and how much she could learn if she could go to school.