Schools "support services"

nyc dad

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Jul 28, 2011
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I haven't noticed in any of the big private schools in DR services for students,like speech,occupational therapy and so on.Are these non existent in DR schools system? There was an old,old thread about a private speech therapist looking for work on here,but with the search function nothing comes up.I even tried yellow pages(Dominican) and nothing.My wife was telling me about a documentary she watched about how THE DR is not ready to deal with kids with special needs.Anybody has any input???
 

Chirimoya

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Dec 9, 2002
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It's rare, but based on a friend's experience there are specialist centres and one good private school that was able to deal with a child with certain challenges - and with surprisingly good results so far. All in Santo Domingo. I can give you more specific details via PM + the name of the school, and if you like, I will ask her for contact details of the specialist centre her child attended. Let me know.
 

nyc dad

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Jul 28, 2011
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Just replied to your pm Chiri.Nothing serious,just speech and maybe OT(occupational therapy)nothing behavioural,thanks CC
 

LaTeacher

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May 2, 2008
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nyc dad, there are services, but they're not offered in school. my daughter works with a speech therapist once a week - the doc is cuban and very good -here in santiago
 

expatsooner

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Aug 7, 2004
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The private schools don't offer these services because they are not mandated to take every child that lives in the area like American public schools. For most of these schools it comes down to ecomonics. It is very expensive to hire qualified staff (esp. if the staff are expats brought in to work) to work with a very small percentage of the student body. Also most of these private schools will have something about being a college prep school in their mission statement so they are targeting and trying to admit the most academic of the students that apply.
 

bob saunders

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Jan 1, 2002
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My wife has post grad in educational psychology and parents will show up with a child for registering. Part of the process is to find out the past educational history of the child and do an assessment test on the child. These parents will have been refused admitance to the Catholic school, the christian school, Doulos Discovery...etc. My wife will assess whether she has the capability to help the child or not ( I personally think the assessment is more of the parent/parents) She will take a certain amount of children with learning disabilities but often she refers the parents to specialists in La Vega and Santiago for further assessment. I'll try to find out the names of these specialists.
 

LaTeacher

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May 2, 2008
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there are plenty of private and catholic schools in the USA that offer support services to kids with learning disabilities. and i believe it's something that they're working on now at SCS (at least as far as learning disabilities, maybe not speech and behavior) and they hired someone to take over that end in their high school. however, it's not enough.

there are some special schools for kids with severe problems - here in santiago, there's one in los jardines, that works with kids with behavioral disorders, adhd, dyslexia etc... BUT the "problems" are so diverse, I imagine it must be difficult for the teachers to work that out. and it's expensive (6,000 pesos a month) for most parents.

the public system has "escuelas especiales" but they mostly cater to downs syndrome and other kind of developmental issues, not necessarily learning differences. there's also the "sordo-mudos" (and why be PC? that's what the disability is - should we call them hearing and speaking impaired? that doesn't describe who the school works with as an impairment doesn't denote complete deafness.)

About seven years ago the government mandated that schools need to mainstream (integrate) visually impaired (not blind) children into classrooms with their peers. In the public system, they must be admitted (with teachers who have no training for that at all) but in the private system, it is up to the director whether or not to admit - i've seen few in my time here actually integrated into the classroom, but many who are sat a desk and ignored all day while the school collects their money.