Thirty inclusive education teachers in Hohoe undergo training

Thirty inclusive education teachers in Hohoe undergo training. A total of 30 selected inclusive education teachers from 15 schools in the Hohoe Municipality are undergoing a week training workshop with the aim of gaining insights on caring for the special need child.

It was sponsored by the Visio International in collaboration with Blind Sparks.

Mr Jeremiah Badu Shayar, Country Programme Coordinator, Holistic Development Programme for Visually Impaired Children (HODVIC), said the workshop was a dialogue on how to support the visually impaired in the classrooms.

He noted that HODVIC, which began in 2019, had trained people such as social workers, optometrists, parents and ophthalmic nurses who were in the chain of providing critical care for children.

Mr Shayar said the training of teachers would equip them with skills to educate the visually impaired child to ensure that they became independent in life to be able to function as regular children in school and at home.

He said since there was the need for collaboration between parents and other stakeholders which led to the training parents on the necessary care to provide for the visually impaired children.

Mrs Birgit Jungblut, Visio International Resource Teacher and International Trainer, said the training workshop would also enable the teachers to easily identify features that would aid the care for the visually impaired children.

Mrs. Janet Valerie Datsa Agbotse, Hohoe Municipal Director of Education, said the Ghana Education Service as a matter of urgency introduced the Inclusive Education Policy into schools to care for the special need child who for times past had not been considered for education.

She said basic level education was a basic right for the Ghanaian child therefore it was laudable that governments over the years had embraced the Policy and were implementing it with the help of foreign partners in education.

Mrs. Agbotse said the Policy had been of immense help to special need children who would have been exempted from education because of one disability yet were now at par with their counterparts in the regular basic schools.

She said integrating the visually impaired child into the regular school had been one of the great achievements of the Inclusive Education Policy in Ghana.

Mrs. Agbotse said despite the achievements, it was necessary to continue to create awareness, train and retrain teachers for a wider and a more successful implementation that no visually impaired child was left behind because of a disability.

She urged participants to consider themselves lucky to have been selected since they would be exposed to new knowledge in modern trends of handling the visually impaired which would be helpful to them not only in the classroom but all through life.

Mrs. Agbotse urged them to share the valuable information with other colleague staff members so that ‘the information goes round for all to benefit.’

She commended the efforts of sponsors and collaborators towards the implementation of the Policy in the Municipality including free screening exercises, community engagements and provision of assistive devices to visually impaired children.

Source: GNA