The percentage of children with learning disabilities (LD) in India is estimated at 10-14 percent of the national child population of 450 million. Though this translates into a massive 45 million young citizens, there’s little awareness within schools about how they can offer educational support and care to children with learning disabilities. Addressing this lacuna in Indian primary-secondary education is Positive Outcomes Inc (estb.1995), a New Jersey-based company which offers counselling services and teacher training programmes to schools across America.
In June this year, Positive Outcomes’ India representative Swathi Menon, a highly-qualified and trained special educator, signed up with SGKM International School, a CIE-affiliated K-12 school in Ghatkopar (Mumbai), to establish a first-of-its-kind compre-hensive family and learning resource centre on the school campus. The centre’s objective is to offer teachers and parents with children suffering from LD guidance and support.
Established in 2004, SGKM International is a joint initiative of Maharashtra Samaj Ghatkopar (MSG) and Shree Ghatkopar Kelwani Mandal (SGKM) and offers pre-school-class XII education to 1,400 students. This progressive institution, which has academic collaboration agreements with the New Zealand-based Kiwi Bears International School, Cambridge International Examinations and Waterford Institute (USA), invited Positive Outcomes to establish a centre on its premises to help its 140 teachers identify and transact with LD children.
“Our teacher training programme, which has been developed after extensive research and consultation with special educators, enables teachers to teach, support and care for children with learning disabilities to attain their trapped potential,” says Menon, a postgraduate in counselling psycho-logy of Mumbai University with postgrad certification from Xavier Institute of Counselling Psychology.
Before signing up with Positive Outcomes in April this year, Menon served as a counsellor of the AVM Group of schools and Garodia School, both sited in Mumbai. Utilising her rich and varied experience of working with challenged children and adolescents, she has conceptualised and developed a learning disability programme titled ‘Understanding Learning Disability’ for teachers.
“The needs of children with learning disabilities are best met through early intervention and by removing barriers to learning. This can happen only when teachers are quick to discern children’s development delays and are equipped to develop customised curriculums to help them cope with academics. Simultaneously it’s important also to counsel and advise parents so they can create supportive home environments,” says Menon, currently a visiting pre-doctoral fellow at the Early Learning Lab at Northwestern University, Illinois, Chicago.
Enthused by the excellent response and word-of-mouth publicity its maiden centre at SGKM School has received, Menon has drawn up an ambitious plan to rollout Positive Outcomes’ services to other schools in India. “We want to offer this programme, which can be customised to meet the needs of pre-primary, primary and secondary schools, to education institutions across India,” says Menon who has recently authored a handbook titled Understanding Learning Disabilities.
Power to your elbow!
Jubilee Cardozo (Mumbai)