HKI Opened My Eyes About Education for All
Inclusive education in public schools for special needs students is a fairly new concept in Indonesia. But it's one that HKI helped introduce and establish since first partnering with the Education Ministry in 2003. Over the next ten years, HKI helped build professional policy training for principals and teachers, and education for families and communities. Prior to that, a school would have never considered welcoming a student with a disability into a mainstream classroom.
Mrs. Sobariyah (pictured at right) is a School Supervisor in Depok City, just south of Jakarta in Indonesia. Despite recent government regulation around inclusive education for students with physical and learning disabilities, Mrs. Sobariyah had no information on how to integrate and support students with special needs in her schools. “I had been hearing about it, but they really just started encouraging us to start implementing,” she explained. “I was curious and wanted to learn more about how to do it effectively. This was new territory for us!"
Helen Keller International’s professional training programs for educators helped familiarize Mrs. Sobariyah and the other school supervisors about the benefits of inclusive education, as well as dispell some common myths. Mrs. Sobariyah acknowledged that she had believed having a child with special needs in a classroom would be negative influence on the other children. Through the training program, her eyes were opened to managable and effective ways to make inclusive classrooms work in her schools and the opportunities it affords all children. "This was the first training I ever had like this and I was really surprised at how much I thought I knew, but needed to learn,” she said.
Today, Mrs. Sobariyah is the proud supervisor of several schools offering inclusive education. She holds regular meetings with teachers to support and continually improve their efforts and carefully monitor progress. She also works directly with the school principals to better anticipate needs of their students, schools, and communities as more families learn of the benefits of integrated classrooms.
To date, HKI's inclusive education program has benefited tens of thousands of special needs children and trained thousands of educators in Jakarta, West Java, Central Java/Yogyakarta, East Java, South Sulawesi, and Aceh. We are currently establishing 161 new inclusive education schools in the Greater Jakarta area, which will train more than 900 educators over the next two years.
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