Homeschooling children with disabilities
Text and photos by Eimor Santos, VERA Files
Students his age would be waking up before sunrise and rushing to school at 7 a.m., but 17-year-old Paolo Lorenzo de Jesus starts class any time he wants.
In their home in Pandi, Bulacan, De Jesus reads his books when he is in the mood and takes recess and lunch breaks as long as he wants. But like other students, he has to submit the school's requirements and pass exams.
De Jesus is a fourth year high school student enrolled in a home-study program. Because he was born with cerebral palsy, he cannot move his hands and feet, making it hard for him to go to school every day.
So the school and his parents agreed that De Jesus should just study from home, making him the school's first and only homeschooling student.
The home is often thought as the perfect sanctuary for children with special needs and children with disabilities (CWDs) like De Jesus. They can learn in the comfort of their homes without the usual fears of being bullied or discriminated.
But while there is no place like home, as the saying goes, it is not always the best place for schooling for everyone, according to the Department of Education (DepEd) and National Council on Disability Affairs (NCDA). Both government agencies advocate an inclusive education program in which the end goal is to bring CWDs to regular schools.
"They cannot be in their homes forever," said Annie Blanca, head of DepEd's Special Education (SPED) Division.
NCDA Deputy Executive Director Mateo Lee Jr. said that as much as possible, only those with "severe" disabilities should undergo the home-based education program. These could include those with both hearing and visual impairments like Helen Keller and those who cannot go to school like De Jesus.
For Lee, homeschooling is a form of segregating CWDs from the rest of the community of learners.
Special place for special needs
Republic Act 7277, or the Magna Carta for Persons with Disabilities, mandates, "The State shall develop nonformal education programs intended for the total human development of persons with disabilities." This is where homeschooling comes in.
DepEd estimates there are 5.49 million children with special needs, or 13 percent of the total population of children. Of this number, 4.2 million are CWDs while the rest are fast learners or gifted children.
According to DepEd's definition, CWDs are those with hearing, visual, mobility, intellectual and speech/language impairment, serious emotional disturbance, autism, and special health conditions.
The department has devised ways of reaching out to them. One is the Distance Education Program, where itinerant teachers go to faraway communities to attend to students who cannot go to SPED centers or regular schools, including homeschool them.
But the government budget for SPED remains a major constraint despite a 56 percent this year. "This is to the point that sometimes teachers have no transportation allowance, they shell out their own money," Lee said.
This happens to rural communities where schools are too far from the homes of CWDs. Itinerant teachers literally have to go the extra mile.
And because of enticing offers abroad, many SPED teachers are leaving the country, David said.
Why home study?
In homeschooling, students are usually given modules and assisted by parents or itinerant teachers. It can be facilitated either by an existing school or a parent. Because of this, it is hard to track the number of homeschooling students, DepEd said.
What is certain, though, is more and more regular schools offer homeschooling programs today.
One such school is the Kids' World Integrated School (KWIS) in Quezon City, where Emily Ann Palaruan, a mother of two homeschooled kids, now teaches other students too.
Palaruan started homeschooling with her eldest, Jyanne, eight years ago.
"When I was looking for a school for my son in preschool, my son was very active, he doesn't like to sit down too long. I already assumed that he is not for traditional school. I tried to look for a school that would fit his learning style," she said.
KWIS has 28 homeschooling students, two of them are children with special needs. One has moderate autism; the other has undiagnosed dyscalculia, a learning disability characterized by extreme difficulty with numbers and arithmetic.
"If they go to a regular school, the pace is really very fast, and then there are so many students there, they're gonna be left out, they're gonna be bullied," Palaruan said. "The teacher has no time to know what's really happening in his mind, what does he have in his heart, what are his struggles, he'll just be graded according to his performance. I think that's not fair if the student has learning difficulties."
The KWIS example
Different schools and homes have different approaches to homeschooling.
At KWIS, students usually study the modules in their own homes twice a week. For the rest of the week, they join other homeschooling students in a support group. This is to develop the children's social skills.
Every Saturday they attend the so-called A.R.T.S. @ Home program where they learn Arts, Rhythm, Theater and Sports.
Students take the annual standardized tests at the Center for Educational Measurement to evaluate their academic performances and keep up with DepEd standards.
Self-discovery
In the course of homeschooling students, Palaruan has gotten to know more of herself: She discovered that what she has had since birth were actually learning disabilities.
When she was in sixth grade, her reading skills were those of a kindergartner. She realizes now that this is dyslexia. She has also had dyscalculia and ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder).
"I was very bad in school, I had very poor grades," she said. But when it came to performing arts like dancing, she was the star.
Palaruan had to learn the hard way. But in the case of the KWIS students, there are people like her who guide them all the way.
De Jesus' dilemma
Unlike KWIS, De Jesus' high school is not accredited by DepEd to offer a home-study program.
Under the informal arrangement between his parents and the school administration, De Jesus would be given modules for each subject and the principal herself would visit him to tutor him.
"This is our way of helping him," the principal said of De Jesus, who had been a consistent honor student back in preschool and elementary.
In those days, De Jesus was helped by Ate Nikki, his nanny. But when Ate Nikki went abroad for good, he had to conquer high school alone.
The school was a looming five-story building, so Kuya Ariel, the janitor, had had to carry De Jesus to his class. Because Kuya Ariel could not do it every day, from first to third year De Jesus went to school twice or thrice a week only.
Now that De Jesus is a senior, the only way to his classroom on the fifth floor is a narrow emergency exit. The danger that might befall him led to his homeschooling.
Blanca sees no problem with the setup entered into by the school and De Jesus' parents, but said the school should send a teacher every now and then to check on him and coordinate with the parent or guardian assisting him.
On the other hand, Lee said the school should have provided "reasonable accommodation" for De Jesus, by moving the seniors' classroom to the ground floor.
Going mainstream
Blanca and Lee suggested various strategies for De Jesus and other CWDs to go back to regular schooling.
Students in a home-study program can take placement tests in order to assess their preparedness to go to regular schools. This is called mainstreaming.
Partial mainstreaming is a good option, said Blanca and Lee. Twice a week, the student stays at home or at a special school but for the rest of the week, he goes to a regular school to learn with his classmates and teachers. This is widely practiced in Australia and called split-schooling, Lee said.
Regular schools such as the Ramon Magsaysay High School in Quezon City have a resource room where CWDs can go during vacant periods and be assisted by a SPED teacher.
"If you enroll him (a CWD) in a regular class right away, there is no support mechanism, so it will be hard for him. It will also be hard for the regular school teacher," Lee said.
KWIS agrees that students should eventually be enrolled in regular schools.
"But it's the parents' option whether they want homeschooling until high school," said Palaruan, whose son Jyanne is now a sophomore at a regular high school and lives in a dormitory.
Elusive inclusiveness
Unfortunately, the total inclusion of CWDs in regular schools is not as easy.
While SPED enrolment was as high as 235,060 last year, only a meager 3,028 were mainstreamed in both elementary and high schools, according to DepEd statistics. This despite RA 7277 which makes it unlawful for any learning institution to deny PWDs admission to any course it offers because of their disability.
Like De Jesus, 13-year-old Joemari Casuela has cerebral palsy. He can walk and move, and can write his name and some numbers. But his speech is slurred and he finds it hard to read. When his mother Dolores tried to enroll him in an elementary school, they were turned away. The principal told them to go to a special school instead.
Good thing that a nearby village called Sindalan in Pampanga has a community learning resource center (CLRC) for PWDs offered under the Alternative Learning System for Differently Abled Persons (ALS-DAP). Today, Casuela learns with 20 other classmates who have mental retardation, Down syndrome and autism. (Learn more about Barangay Sindalan.)
ALS-DAP facilitator Lord David had homeschooled a 7-year-old child who has mental retardation. He used to visit the child's house every Saturday and tutor not just the child but the mother as well on how to teach the child. Today, mother and child do homeschooling all on their own.
The author is a senior journalism student at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She submitted this story for the journalism seminar class "Reporting on Persons with Disabilities" under VERA Files trustee Yvonne T. Chua.
(VERA Files is put out by veteran journalists taking a deeper look at current issues. VERA is Latin for "true.")