Special Education is known eversince yet when we talk about this topic, it is usually ignored due to high tuition fee rates in private schools and institutions. Not everyone can afford this and most of the Filipino children with exceptional needs are not getting the learning they need as they grow specially if they belong in below average families.
When we talk about exceptional needs it doesn’t only mean autism. It also pertains to visual, hearing and speaking impairment, physical and orthopedic disability, learning and behavioural disability and others. If a parent wants educational access for their students, they can always enroll their children to private schools offering special education program, where in there are teachers specialized to attend to the needs of the said students. Other parents choose home schooling being attended by a SPED teacher. Unfortunately there are only few SPED teachers in the Philippines so it is definitely a challenge if the government will push through with inclusive education to government schools. This have already started but the population of SPED students in public schools are not that evident as of yet due to lack of hype by the Department of Education to spread awareness. As of now there is still no concrete structure on how this will continue to be implemented in the Philippines for this proposal to reach its success.
Since SPED is already being recognized, DepEd started to propose inclusive education to government schools since school year 2016-2017, the goal is to provide programs in elementary and highschool to provide opportunity to below average parents with children having special needs. DepEd wants integration to happen to regular class, that the students with exceptional needs will be integrated to regular students in a regular classroom set up.
There will be two parts of integration,
PARTIAL INTEGRATION where in students with exceptional needs will join regular students only in extra curricular programs and then gradually to academic subjects until they are able to fully adapt to the environment and feel acceptance from other students.
The other part is FULL INTEGRATION where in students with exceptional needs will be completely joined in a regular classroom set up with regular students on both extra curricular and academic subjects which I personally think is going to be too risky both for the teachers and the students.
Not all teachers in public schools have received a training for special education, and few weeks or months of training might not be just enough since teachers will be required to focus on the cognitive and psychological side in handling students with exceptional needs, plus emotions must be prepared as a teacher goes along with this.
Teachers would need work double time in order to set balance in attending the needs of students with exceptional needs and regular students with different behaviour. One more thing to consider is how these students will be able to get along despite their differences specially now that bullying and discrimination is becoming such a sensitive issue.
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