Special Education Background

Background of the study The International community has committed itself to achieving basic education through the Millennium Developmental Goals and Education for All Goals. This framework advocates schools across the nation to move towards including children with disabilities in the general education classroom regardless of category and severity of disability. Moreover, different legal mandates such as Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, Individuals with Disabilities Act of 1990 and No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, have added numerous responsibilities for regular teachers, especially the Least Restrictive Environment. The LRE required student with disabilities to be educated with

As public SPED teacher for about five years in Bulakan, I have realized and reflected through my own experiences, the importance of training before handling children with special needs. We started with only 23 regular pupils who were overage, repeaters and had difficulty in reading and writing. I was only giving them remedial classes in the afternoon. However, a sudden increase in enrolment never prepared the school and the teachers, for the SPED program had just started. From 23 regular pupils, the following year, it increased to 42 then enrolment was totalled with 64 pupils assessed with disabilities. Presently, the Center caters 75 children with special needs consisting of 33 % in the mainstreaming program, 20% in the integration program and 47 % in the self-contained program. There are 23 receiving teachers handling children with disabilities in their classroom. It never surprised me when I heard negative comments and feedbacks from the regular teachers about the difficulties they were experiencing of having a child with disabilities in their classroom. Most of the time, when children misbehave in the regular class, regular teachers will send them back to SPED resource room while I was also having my class/ session. One teacher commented, “Matutuyuan ako ng dugo sa batang yan.”. Another quoted line from the teacher, “Tayo pa ng tayo, salita ng salita, naiistorbo mga kaklase. Hindi pa siya pwede sa regular class”. These are just some of the comments from the regular teachers which implied that they expected children with disabilities to be as normal as the other regular students. There were even times when teachers would find faults on the child just to pull him/her from the regular class and bring it back to the SPED resource classroom. I for myself had experienced during the second year of the SPED program, that no matter