AFTER more than four decades of supporting children with special needs, The Mico University College’s Child Assessment and Research in Education (CARE) Centre has upgraded its learning environment, unveiling renovations to five classrooms aimed at creating better spaces for students to learn, develop, and thrive.

The project, valued at approximately $24 million, was done in collaboration with Digicel Foundation and partners and provides classrooms with specialised sensory and occupational therapy equipment designed to aid concentration, emotional regulation, and physical engagement.

“The classrooms before were just regular classrooms. The rooms were very old, wooden floors, old aluminum windows, and so on, which are from the 1980s. Renovating these rooms makes the learning space more modern, more accommodating. So what we’ve done, we have looked at the needs of the clients that we serve,” Micro CARE Centre Director Dr Sharon Anderson-Morgan explained after the official handing over and ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday.

“So the rooms are now fit for purpose, they’re not just a regular classroom. We have children who are fidgety, for example, because they have attention-deficit disorder or any kind of disorder that causes them to want to move all the time. So we have the kick bands on the chair, they can put their feet on the chair. We have the wobbly things at the end of it, so they can rock and can move,” she added.

Anderson-Morgan pointed to several challenges faced by the institution prior to its renovation.

“The rooms were very, very hot. When you have spaces that are hot and you have bodies moving around, people are going to get a little agitated sometimes. So we’ve had children who react terribly to the heat. For example, we had some of our kids with autism and it gets hot and they would just start screaming,” she said.

“Also, we could not move the furniture as we would like to, because the old furniture did not allow for us to. If you’re going to move the chairs, it’s going to scrape the floor, some children are sensitive to that. They didn’t fit together the way these fit together,” Anderson-Morgan said, adding that the lighting at the facility was also an issue.

“We had these old fluorescent lights that also affected some children. There were children who would look up because they’re hypersensitive to visual stimuli. They would get scared because they think they’re seeing patterns in the ceiling. I remember one day we had to cover a portion of the ceiling with paper because the child kept looking up there because he thought he was seeing something else,” said Anderson-Morgan.

Student Azari Kennedy interacts with Dr Shelleka Matthews, manager of The Mico CARE Centre at the official hand over of five retrofitted classrooms. (Photo: Karl Mclarty)

She underscored that the renovations will not only benefit students who enter the facility through its intervention programme, but also those who come in for assessment.

“Sometimes children come here for assessment and they are dysregulated. The clinicians now have the centre space to take them, calm them down before they can assess them, because before, sometimes they can’t get to assess them unless they come back because a child is screaming, running all over the place,” Anderson-Morgan said, adding that the centre assesses close to 1,000 children yearly.

She hastened to add that despite the centre being known to conduct assessments, its services extend beyond that.

“We do assessment, we do intervention, not just academic, because we have speech therapy. And we have occupational therapy, behaviour therapy, we have behaviour therapy for one group, and that’s only because we don’t have an on-site behaviour therapist, so we have to bring in the service. And we also have counselling services, we have a counselling centre up there, where even some of our kids in the intervention programme, they also receive counselling as needed, and sometimes their families need it as well,” she explained.

Permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth, and Information Kasan Troupe welcomed the upgraded facility and lauded Digicel Foundation and partners for their investment in the special needs sector.

“We’re going to have a room that teachers will be exposed to improve opportunities to train and integrate technology because it is technology-enabled. We’re going to have a room that will build confidence in learners because here they have a safer space, a modern space that they can make mistakes, learn and grow and be strong because they are fully supported with specialists that can train them and support them in the way they should grow,” she said.

“You’re going to have learners who cannot communicate confidently. You’re going to have learners who will learn new skills so they can transform their whole realities in the future. That’s the promise of this investment,” Troupe added.

The Mico University College CARE Centre states on its website that it was established in 1980 as a centre of excellence, dedicated to child assessment and research in education. It was formed through a partnership between The Netherlands and Jamaican governments.