‘Give equal opportunities to children with special needs’
The Dean of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Cape Coast, Professor Dora F. Edu-Buandoh, has urged stakeholders in education to create equal opportunities for children with special needs.
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She expressed worry over how the needs of those children were treated with disdain, thereby jeopardising their future.
God’s gifts
“They are also God’s gifts to us and we must provide facilities to aid them to develop and excel in their education so that together we can build the nation,” she stressed.
Prof. Edu-Buandoh expressed the concern in an interview with the Daily Graphic after she had addressed the speech and prize-giving day of the Rev. Alec Jones Memorial Methodist Basic School at Nkanfoa in the Central Region last Tuesday.
It was on the theme: “Equal opportunities education for national development”.
An Accra daily reported that seven visually impaired students of the Adidome Senior High School in the Volta Region could not write the West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) because their braille question papers had not been printed.
Their names and index numbers were also not included in the attendance sheet.
Prof. Edu-Buandoh was not happy about that development and urged school authorities to consider all children when “we provide facilities for education. Each Ghanaian child is important for the development of the nation”.
Equal access
She said society was counting on those in charge of education in the country to provide equal access to educational opportunities for each child so that the future of the nation could be guaranteed.
“If we fail to do this, posterity will not absolve us. It is our duty and we must rise to the task,” she added.
Prof. Edu-Buandoh commended parents for their support for schools in the communities, adding, “If we are to rely only on the state, our children will not have the quality of education they should have.”
The Headmistress of the school, Ms Hannah Vanderpuye, in a report, said a UK-based couple, the Bossmans, had, through their benevolence, assisted the school to put up a three-storey building to decongest large class sizes.
Achievement
She said some of the past pupils of the school were reading Medicine and Optometry, while others were studying professional courses at the tertiary level.
She said the school got flooded anytime it rained, thereby affecting attendance and academic work.
She appealed to parents to be more responsible for the needs of their children, since failure to do that could affect the children negatively.
The Omanhen of the Oguaa Traditional Area, Osabarima Kwesi Atta II, urged the pupils to concentrate on their studies.
