DATSS engages special needs parents on teacher support services

Disability Awareness Teachers Support Service (DATSS), a non-governmental organisation that provides support to teachers and teachers aid working with students with disabilities, has trained parents of children with cerebral palsy to equip them to handle their children’s education better.

The training focused on the strategies, tactics and tools used to educate children with special educational needs and parents’ preparedness to educate their children.

Dr Comfort Walker, Chief Executive Officer of DATSS, said her organisation aimed at training educated persons to become teachers aid in various schools and even at the household level to support children with cerebral palsy and other disability to be educated.

“We hope to train National Service persons to work as Teacher aids in the various schools to support government’s inclusive education agenda or at home to educate children who need special education,” she said.

Dr Walker, who specializes in low incidence disability and has worked as a special education teacher in the United States for 17 years, said having teachers aid in schools was a good start, “your child with special needs going to school will not be limited.

Sharing her own experience, she said “I was educated in Ghana, and I struggled a bit in school because the way I learn was not how I was taught.”

Dr Walker urged parents to equip themselves with information and data about their children to enable them to educate them.

The parents, members of the Special Mothers Project, an advocacy and awareness creation programme of cerebral palsy issues, asked practical questions and shared their lived experiences.