MAJOR issues of concern affecting children with special needs in education were focal points of The Mico University College College Child Assessment and Research (CARE) Centre’s sixth Biennial Special Education Conference at the Jamaica Conference Centre on Thursday and Friday last week.

Under the theme, “Empowering Teachers: Taking Action to Deliver Quality Education”, the conference focused on five broad areas: reading difficulties, mathematics difficulties, gender-based learning, behaviour management, and quality education from quality teachers.

Conference chair and quality assurance manager at Mico CARE Allison McGraham said that the conference is a part of the CARE centre’s intervention strategies to help make the educational landscape better for children with special needs, following assessments that they do in the schools.

“It is our mandate to provide service of the highest quality to not only Jamaica but to the region and we do that through our assessments. We follow up the results that we find with workshops for the teachers and conferences such as this,” McGraham told the Jamaica Observer.

“The teachers colleges can’t do it on their own. There is no other organisation that is really going out there to assist the teachers who are already in the classroom in a very deliberate and intentional way. So we see that as a part of our responsibility, and so every two years we put on a major conference where we try to focus on the areas of weakness in our education system. And so we have stepped in as an educational institution,” she explained.

McGraham said that many of the referrals at The Mico CARE Centre come from the school system, and that is when they do their assessments.

“And out of those assessments, we have noticed certain things: the students who are referred to us are underperforming. They are functioning several years below their grade level. And the teachers who teach them are finding that they are not fully equipped to assess the children to help them perform at the level at which they can perform,” she said.

McGraham told Career & Education that the aim of the CARE centre’s work, and by extension, the conference, is that the children are helped.

“It is really about the children. The teachers are there [to] facilitate the process of children maximising their potential so they have to have the right skills and the understanding that is required to achieve those goals that is within them. A lot of the children really have it within them and they just need the help to get it out, and that is how Jamaica is going to move forward,” she noted.

“It is now incumbent on the teachers to go out and apply it. The have now been given many tools that they can use to make the education system better.”

Over the two days, the 321 teachers who participated heard presentations from Minister of Education Ruel Reid, Educational Psychologist and Lecturer at University of Virginia Abigail Norfleet-James, Commissioner of Jamaica Tertiary Education Commission Maxine Henry Wilson, Dr Howard McKnoff, and Director of Project Achieve and Mico Lecturer Carlyn Thompson.