Competitive schooling for specially abled

The children are divided into different levels to meet the changing needs and intellectual abilities as they grow up. Careful design and planning for each child ensures the learning progress. It helps children to achieve higher grades and appear for recognised board examinations

CH Saibaba

Shankar Foundation's Shraddha Center for Special Education is a day care school established in 2003 for children with variety of special needs. The children are divided into different levels to meet the changing needs and intellectual abilities as they grow up. Careful design and planning for each child ensures the learning progress. It helps children to achieve higher grades and appear for recognised board examinations. Most of them are benefitted through this grade level curriculum who came out with excellence of National Institute of Open Schooling Secondary School Certification. Presently there are 300 children with different needs who are attending different levels of special education.

Shraddha School is led by the founder principal D Sridevi who is a well experienced special educator with a masters degree in psychology and diploma in remedial education with the qualified team. Her aim is always to maximise the children’s ability and their desire to learn. The staff to student ratio is 1:6, which enables a teacher to work intensively to give individual support to each child.

Talking to Hyderabad Hans, Sridevi said, “Shanker Foundation had four branches viz Sharaddha Saaburi,Sannidhi and Sammardh. Their vision is to transform the lives of the children with special needs and their families through education. Our school is a partner of the British Global Gateway where there are more than 4000 partnerships between schools in the UK and other countries. As per the request of the Bihar Govt, we have opened our centre ‘Summet’ in Patna in 2011 which is running well. We also got a request from Assam Govt to open such a centre.”

Mrudula Reddy, a Kuchipudi classical dancer is giving free dance lessons in the school to spread the tradition and glory of Indian classical dances. Shraddha has a specific and structured curriculum prepared by Sridevi and her team which meets the individual needs and the age of children. The curriculum is broad, relevant and balanced to prepare children to take up National Open School’s examinations. It also helped many parents and teachers to integrate their children into mainstream schools. Their students have participated in international sports held at Greeece, Australia and USA and won medals for the country.

Saaburi Multidisciplinary Clinic for Special Needs for children was established in 2005 with facilities for physiotherapy ,occupational therapy, speech therapy among others, which focuses on providing the best for the child's family and school’s needs. Intervention plans focus on needs, strengths, priorities, goals and actions to be undertaken. This is regularly reviewed, evaluated and documented in detail. Intervention may be one-on-one or in group sessions where specific needs of the child are focused upon. Presently there are 35 children between the age group of 1-10 years attending different sessions of therapy.

Sannidhi Center for Residential Care opened its residential campus at Vikarabad, 70 kilometers away from Hyderabad in 2009 to improve the life skills. The program encourages independence, individual responsibility and achievement. Students learn to develop independence, a sense of responsibility and ability to self-advocate from the first day they step on the campus. Presently there are 48 students residing in the campus while learning to be on their own in all aspects.

Samardh Vocational Training and Production Center was established in 2011 with the help of friends and parents. It provides comprehensive vocational training for students, with different needs needed to perform a particular job, to make them productive citizens of our society. Presently they are making Non Woven Bags (substitutes of plastic bags), paper bags, greeting cards and crafts from waste materials. They are also getting trained in assembling, packing and printing including preparing of eco-friendly Ganesh Idols for Ganesh festival.