“Get the child ready at school with the skills will need for the life”,
Jose Marti
Zita Rojas de Almeida Clinton (28) and Lourdes Enamorado Leyva (33) are part of the staff at Jose Antonio Aguilera Maceira Special School for slight, restrained and severe mental retarded young children and adolescents.
They are very nice and also the result of an accurate family monitoring of the Special Education in Cuba who teach retarded people to get them ready to face life. They are never neither late nor absent at work, and examples of responsibility. They carry out all the activities, including those scheduled by the Union and they feel loved and respected by every body.
Delfina Rodriguez Loren, graduated in Oligophrenia Education, is the director of this school. She is been there since 1992 as a therapeutic teacher.
Social inclusion, main goal
Jose Antonio Aguilera Maceira Special School is in Playa municipality in Havana. It has 209 students, from them, 16 are kept in. Students are admitted when they are six years old coming from the nurseries, primary schools or the program Educate your child, who have been diagnosed with mental retardation. This is the most common disability in Cuba with the 78, 7 percent of the total registration in Special Education.
Once the students arrive at school,” she said “we start a process of observation and integral diagnose, so we can see the real skills they have. Afterwards, when they are 12 years old, they are assigned to the five workshops of the school: carpentry, craftwork, basic techniques of agriculture, domestic education and clothing.
When they are 15 we place them in workplaces of production or services, according to the skills they achieved and taking into consideration their limitations from the intellectual point of view.
Those able to stay in the job left school at the age of 18, the director explained, and the ones who are not able to develop the necessary skills to work are taken back to their communities, with their families and monitored by the institution.
Iralia, in speech therapy her whole life
Iralia Gongora Pupo works in this school since the academic course 1984-1985 and next September will celebrate 40 years working in this branch, 35 of them devoted to this type of education.
If I were born again, I will be a logaoedics in Special School. This career allows me work with them by their process of learning, observing them how they arrive without pronouncing the words correctly, and they finally manage to win the mistakes and right the wrongs by means of the treatment.
“You model the human material and prepare it for life, the youngest ones for the everyday life, and the oldest for a useful and independent life. They are children you teach them everything, how to walk in life, to know, because some of them come from homes where they have not received the stimulus they need. I feel I cannot do any other job than this one, not only because I like it, but also for all the humanism it has,” she stressed.
