BEGINNING this summer, the Ministry of Education will be offering training for teachers in the area of special education to better prepare them to deal with children with intellectual disabilities.

Minister of Education Ronald Thwaites made the announcement on May 16 while addressing the official opening of the Edgehill School of Special Education, Brown’s Town Learning Centre, in St Ann.

“This summer we are inviting a number of teachers, we hope it will be in excess of 200, to avail themselves of some special professional continuing development in the area of special education. We will assist in every way we can for those teachers who are interested, and who have the personality, and may I say the heart,” he stated.

Thwaites said the training will allow the participants to gain speciality in educating and diagnosing children with challenges. He also said particular effort will be made by the ministry to identify teachers who are already trained in special education, to ensure that they work in the area of their training.

“We want to bring them all together and we want to make sure that they are assigned to schools that need this help,” he stated.

He said that many children attend school while suffering from learning difficulties which require treatment, but they are left behind because of the lack of special attention.

He argued that special education must become an integral and important sub profession of teaching and should be rewarded accordingly.

The Edgehill School of Special Education is a joint venture between the Ministry of Education and the Jamaica Association on Intellectual Disabilities. The school’s curriculum includes the teaching of functional skills, literacy, numeracy and pre-vocational skills to intellectually-challenged individuals.