More Teachers Needed For Children With Special Needs (Page 11, July 27, 2010)

A specialist committed to addressing Specific Learning Disabilities (SpLD) in Children, Mr Bernard Boaheng, has stressed the need for the establishment of more special training schools for teachers in SpLD.
He said the country needed more teachers in the area to assist children with various forms of SpLD in order to help them identify and address those challenges among the children they taught.
He explained that most children with such problems left home or dropped out of school due to their inability to cope with the conditions in which they found themselves.
Mr Boaheng, who was speaking at a workshop organised by the Special Attention Project (SAP), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) for parents of some street children in its care, said teachers in the country needed to undergo the appropriate training needed to give extra attention to children in their care in order to identify the various learning difficulties that affects them.
He said children with learning disabilities may require special attention and encouragement from both parents and teachers.
Mr Boaheng said while interacting with some children, he discovered that a number of them had various forms of SpLD which had made it difficult for them to cope in some environment.
According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Specific Learning Disabilities (SpLD) mean a severe learning problem due to a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in acquiring, organising or expressing information that manifests itself in school as an impaired ability to listen, reason, speak, read, write, spell or do mathematical calculations, despite appropriate instruction in the general education curriculum.
Some common types of SpLD include Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, and Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome.
Mr Boaheng said “the time has come for parents and teachers to undergo some training in identifying and addressing SpLD in children” adding that, “Ghana has only one special training school for teachers in that field based in Accra”.
He said the workshop was to educate the parents on SpLD and to encourage them on how best they could be of help to their children.
He advised parents not to neglect their wards because they had special learning disabilities, but support and encourage them, adding that teachers who teach such children should also endeavour to give special attention to them to help them develop their skills.