Coming: Another school on wheels for special kids

Ishrat S Banwait

Tribune News Service 

Chandigarh, June 28

A year after specially abled children in the city were introduced to the Kalam Express, a school on the wheels, another one is on the cards. Having helped hundreds of children, another bus will help ease the load on the current staff. It will also help in reaching out to the children regularly because currently, they are visited once a week.

The brainchild of UT Deputy Commissioner Ajit Balaji Joshi, the country’s second such project was launched in Chandigarh in June last year. Before Chandigarh, Joshi had successfully launched the project in Jind when he was the DC there. Now, his wife and Panchkula Deputy Commissioner Gauri Parasher Joshi is working on launching the next one in Panchkula.

The Kalam Express uses a refurbished van from the Red Cross Society and goes door to door in slum areas to provide education to special children who are unable to attend regular school. The service is provided to them free of cost and has helped many children improve and even made them capable of attending regular school.

How it works

A team comprising a driver, a special educator and a physiotherapist conducts door-to-door surveys and monitors the special children that it finds. It caters to the visually impaired, the hearing and speech impaired and the mentally challenged (18 other mental ailments).

 The team members then approach the parents and ask for their permission to teach the children. The children are taught in the van which has the necessary infrastructure. However, many parents prefer to keep their special children at home and the team then spends up to 45 minutes with the kids.

The team helps prepare their Aadhaar cards and disability certificates which entitles them to a stipend from the government. The team also helps them get donations like wheelchairs from people.

 They work from Monday to Saturday and visit Maloya, Dhanas, Mani Majra, Mauli Jagran, Bapu Dham Colony and Colony No. 4. They organise their visits so that they get to meet a student once every week which is much better compared to the once-a-month rate that some special schools have. However, this is a major challenge as parents also say that children forget what they are taught in a week. Thus, the second Kalam Express may help solve this issue.

Next they start to engage with the kids and teach them. The care that they provide varies depending on the disability of the child. Visually impaired kids are taught how to touch and feel braille first before teaching them the alphabet. For the hearing and speech impaired students, they communicate using the sign language. The teaching methods vary depending on the IQ of the child.

For physically challenged children, a set of basic movements is done to ascertain which way the joints can move. Resistance training is done to improve their motor skills along these lines. Squeeze ball and gripping exercises are also done with them. The families are also taught the techniques and are asked to regularly practise it with the kids.

The team has identified 260 such kids that qualify for its assistance. Of them, they are currently helping 160 kids. They have helped 36 kids get admission to various government schools and six kids to special schools such as Vatika School in Sector 19.

Know the team

Sandeep Kumar is the special educator who has experience in teaching children with special needs. He has worked with the Social Welfare Department for two years and is to enrol for a masters in psychology at the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped at Dehradun.  “Most of the students I teach are severely disabled and it is hard for them to pay attention, but it motivates me whenever I can get them to focus and finish the task at hand,” he says.

 Navdeep Kaur is the physiotherapist who has worked in a variety of multi-specialty hospitals. She is currently pursuing an MBA in hospital management from ICFAI. “When we first start visiting some of the kids, they are barely able to recognise us but now they have staretd responding to us,” she says. Both of them have been hired on a contractual basis and Sandeep is paid Rs 10,000 per month while Navdeep is paid Rs 15,000 per month.

From not speaking to attending regular school

The team has worked relentlessly in the past one year and has got an 11-year-old girl to attend regular school, who earlier barely spoke. Sandeep Kaur, mother of Harshpreet Kaur, said her daughter had mental disability and did not attend school.

Now, she studies in Class III at the government school in Mani Majra and credits Sandeep and Navdeep with it. “My daughter could barely pick up a pencil let alone talk, but now she attends the government school here,” she said.

Bright future

Talking about the future, Joshi says, “We will soon unveil the second Kalam Express. The new bus will focus on reaching out to more children in the already designated areas”. More staff will be hired for this bus which has been custom-designed for this project. The DC is also planning to unveil a   resource centre for the children so that the team members can visit each child more often. 

(Inputs: Rajanbir Singh)