Latika Roy Foundation (LRF)

Supported by: Wipro

About the organization

Vision: Wabi-Sabi is a program for the educational inclusion of disabled children. At Latika Roy Foundation (LRF), we believe inclusion happens when a child with disabilities is given opportunities to participate in all aspects of regular life—enjoying sports, having fun, leisure, being part of all the things that the family does, making friends, and having a plan for their future. 

Mission: To help disabled children join mainstream schools where they are accepted and included in daily activities besides academics. Our mission is to provide specialized local services for children with disabilities and their families and help others do the same. 

Strategy: To prepare schools for working with disabled students, to prepare the disabled children for mainstream schools, and to prepare the parents of the disabled children for making their child join the regular school.

Location of the work

Dehradun, Uttarakhand

Program updates

WIPRO is supporting the Wabi-Sabi educational inclusion program for LRF in Dehradun. Disability is one of the most serious barriers to education. LRF’s Wabi-Sabi program works with schools to integrate children with developmental disabilities, like Down Syndrome and autism, among others, into mainstream education. 

Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese worldview that recognizes what might be first viewed as imperfect, as beautiful in a unique way, and worthy of appreciation. The Wabi-Sabi (WS) inclusion program closely works with families and children who can be prepared to attend mainstream schools. We sensitize school principals, teachers, students, and their parents to the incalculable advantages of inclusion, and we prepare the school step-by-step for inclusion. 

We conduct workshops for teachers and guide them on methods and techniques that make learning a joy so that no child is left behind. We work with abled children to make the transition for the disabled child an easy one. Our sessions with parents of kids in mainstream schools help drive home the advantages of inclusive classrooms for all children, regardless of age and ability. 

Along with an external consultant, our cross-disciplinary team and the WS team are working on documenting a process that could help other NGOs to mainstream children with disabilities. This document is a work in progress. We also work with more than 30 children with disabilities, from mainstream schools, who come to us for remedial support. The remedial support program covers therapies and learning of skills that are required in mainstream schools.

Learnings 

• It is easier to mainstream children who are between 3-7 years of age. Children with intellectual disabilities take time to learn new skills, and it is very difficult to make them unlearn habits and behaviors, so once prepared, they need to be mainstreamed because they will copy the behaviors of their neurotypical peers. 
• Neurotypical children in mainstream schools are empathetic, curious, and willing to be friends with disabled children once they are introduced to the disabled child on positive terms. 
• Disabled children are successfully mainstreamed to schools that are small in size because the child is given better attention and the staff and principal are more patient and less burdened by policymakers. 
• Schools need to be chosen by the disabled child’s parents at their convenience. 
• Regular follow-up and remedial therapy sessions with disabled children, who have been mainstreamed, lead to sustaining the child in regular schools. 
• Counselling sessions and support groups for parents of disabled children contribute to the maintaining mental health of the parents and lead to sustaining the child in mainstream school. 

Challenges

Some of the challenges are as follows:

• Most schools and teachers lack knowledge about intellectual disabilities and most of them are unwilling to commit time to attend workshops. 
• Class placement of a disabled child is a big challenge. Schools that accept a disabled child want to admit the child into the lowermost class since they want to follow the criterion of intellectual age of the child. However, it is well known that a child needs to be of similar age if not exactly the same age as peers.
• No directives or govt policies about providing academic accommodations for disabled children in Primary grades in mainstream schools. It is done on a case-to-case basis by some schools when the principals/directors etc. are approached. This puts a lot of academic pressure and creates anxiety in disabled students. 
• Lack of awareness about behavior management and basic classroom management strategies creates situations in the classrooms where the disabled child is viewed unfavorably and disqualified from attending school.
• The lack of special educators and counsellors in schools leads to disabled children being turned away from mainstream schools mostly after primary school is over.

Plan for future

WS team hopes to develop a network of schools, in Dehradun that are sensitized to the different kinds of intellectual disabilities that could be seen in school children and how to help these children in mainstream classrooms. Along with our Awareness team, we aim to cover most of the private and government-aided schools. 

After our changemaker symposium, we have also tried to develop a group of school leaders who can exchange information and ideas about mainstreaming disabled children. By conducting free workshops in different schools across Dehradun, we hope to open the doors of more schools for disabled students and to make educational inclusion of the disabled a more achievable goal.

Approaching more schools, school leaders, conducting workshops, and mainstreaming disabled students is also on our agenda.

The Wabi-Sabi team will be working with a government-aided school once a week and will be developing a program to help bridge the gap in the foundational literacy and numeracy of the newly admitted students. The success of such a program will determine our efforts toward capacity building.

We will also be interested in workshops that help to develop the academic skills of disabled children and help us in working with government schools.