EDUCATION officials have reacted with dismay to a report from the deaf community that despite the $103-million Yard to Yard Find the Child initiative, which began in January and lasted three months to locate children who had not attended virtual or face-to-face classes over the pandemic years, students from the deaf community had still escaped notice.

That disclosure came during the National Policy Dialogue on Ending Violence Against Children forum held in the Corporate Area last week.

Speaking via an interpreter, a spokesperson from Ready to Sign, a sign language tutoring outfit, said, “we see many deaf kids who have not even been in school, not even for a day”.

The individual, pitching a question to a panel which included executive director for the National Parenting Support Commission Kaysia Kerr, and director of the Safety and Security in Schools Unit Richard Troupe, said the plight of these children was compounded by the virtual language barrier between them and their parents.

“They are still at home, they can’t do anything because the parents don’t know sign language, they don’t know how to communicate with their deaf kids, they can’t because language access is not there. What can you do about that?” the individual queried.

“In Jamaica we have about 7,000 people in the deaf community… we have more than 132,000 hard of hearing people who themselves are parents. What benefit does your parent support commission have to parents of the deaf community and how can we access that? What support do you have for us?” he questioned further.

Kerr, in responding, said the commission has been hampered in its efforts to assist the deaf community because of the hefty price tag for interpreters.

“We can never find interpreters, and each time we make a call we have to pay, and the fees are exorbitant for someone to interpret.

“We have to work closer with our own special education unit to ensure that they can avail themselves to provide those services,” Kerr said.

Troupe, speaking further to the Jamaica Observer regarding the concern, was somewhat taken aback.

“The person is indicating that some of these children have never been in school. One of the things we would certainly expect, especially because of our Yard-to-Yard Find the Child initiative, is that such matters would have been brought to our attention,” he said.

“I think a very critical next step is to have a conversation with (the individual who raised the concern) to see if we can map these particular families so that we can have an idea where they live and the educational institution in closest proximity to where they live for them to be accommodated,” he said.

Added Troupe: “It is a major cause for concern, and it is something we have to treat with as a matter of urgency. There are a number of facilities that would have been established to treat with children with disabilities; the ministry also supports the inclusion of such students in the regular school system, so it is about us having a conversation to see if we can identify the families and make that kind of representation for them to be integrated into the formal school system”.

The Ministry of Education in January this year, amidst concerns that hundreds of students had fallen off the radar over the period since 2020 when schools shuttered across the island because of the pandemic and still had not surfaced for online classes, engaged 108 social workers and 580 students at a cost of $103 million over three months to find and re-engage those students and their families.