450 students have registered under the Persons with Disabilities quota for a total of 1,600 seats.

 

Last Wednesday, the air-conditioned office of Delhi University’s Dean of Students’ Welfare was a building people stepped into just to escape from the sun. Fakir Chand was sweating, and it was more from trepidation than heat. “I have all the documents,” he says, approaching Komal Kamra, member of the University’s Equal Opportunity Cell. “Except the college-leaving certificate. Those people at the Lady Shri Ram College said that my daughter does not need one,” says Chand, taking out a pair of glasses from the pocket of his shirt.

Kamra, who uses a wheelchair, looks on silently as Chand carefully opens his spectacles: the left-side is a spider-web of cracked glass. He puts them on, and begins to rummage through a white cloth bag slung on his left forearm. The Equal Opportunity Cell has the mandate of working with Persons with Disabilities (PwD) and students admitted under the Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Classes quotas. It counsels PwD candidates at the office of the Dean of Students’ Welfare as they fill up their registration forms for admission to the University’s colleges. This year, the registration went on from May 28-June 8. About 450 students have registered under the Persons with Disabilities quota for a total of 1,600 seats.

The yellow-coloured paper is not difficult to find among a lifetime’s certificates kept inside the polythene cover. “But this is something we gave you last year after you registered,” Kamra says after examining the paper. “Where is your daughter?” she asks, looking around. Now, this was Chand’s problem. He had all the documents for admission, but his daughter was not with him. “She came in a different train, and I have not been able to locate her,” he says. Sweating.

His daughter, Dharamwati, blind since birth, had been admitted to the prestigious Lady Shri Ram College last year. “She got what she asked for: the college, as well as the History course. They could not give her the hostel, though. Most of it was closed for the Commonwealth Games,” says Chand. Chand’s visually challenged daughter did not last a month in Delhi: “She tried staying with a friend and her mother near the college, but could not adjust.” So on August 13, less than a month after classes began at the University, Chand withdrew his daughter and took her back home to Bijnor.

“I sent her to Delhi yesterday along with a relative. I arrived only this morning, as I had some work left back in Bijnor,” says Chand, who is a salesman with a pharmaceutical company. “I got off the train and went straight to (Lady) Shri Ram College, because Dharamwati needs the college-leaving certificate. I was told that we didn’t need one, as she withdrew before August 15,” says Chand, as he borrows a mobile phone to dial a number written on a piece of paper. Dharamwati’s phone is ‘out of coverage area.’

Kamra assures Chand he can come back with his daughter even a day late. “Today is the last date for registrations,” he reminds her. She smiles: “It’s okay. Just find your daughter and come with her tomorrow. She has to choose the college and course herself.” Out of the Dean’s office, Chand continues to worry about his daughter. Loudly, too. “She’s my third child. The ones older than her got married,” he says, trying Dharamwati’s number repeatedly.

A hand clutches Chand’s arm. “Papa.” It turns out that the daughter and relative—Arun, who refuses to take off his denim baseball cap—had figured that Chand would be in the University. Dharamwati’s phone had run out of cash. Back inside the DSW office, Chand sheepishly explains to the student counsellors how his daughter located him because of his loud voice. After a long search for documents, during which the counsellors had to send Dharamwati’s mark sheets for copying, they are allotted a number in the queue. “It’s 47. We have to come back in an hour,” says Chand, on his way out for lunch. Dharamwati is busy running her fingers over the information brochure, in braille, that the counsellors have given her.

The company of three is back in 30 minutes, and wait outside the door uncertainly. Token number 30 is yet to be called. Chand walks around, fiddling with the unbuttoned sleeves of his aquamarine shirt. There are two holes—possibly made by a cigarette—on its bottom-left. Dharamwati has decided to play her cards close to chest: she wouldn’t say whether she will opt for Lady Shri Ram College again. “Last year, my percentage of 85 was very good. I am told this time a lot of students have scored better marks,” is all that she will say. Dharamwati passed out of the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped in Dehra Dun, which she joined in class III.

The wait, the sun, and the suspense of it all gets to Chand. “I do not know of any college except (Lady) Shri Ram. I just want her to get into a college with a hostel,” he says. And then adds a caveat: “a girls’ college with a hostel.” The number is finally called at 3.30 p.m., and only Dharamwati and Arun go to the registration desk. “It’s best I don’t interfere; I don’t understand all these things,” he says, giving the white cloth bag to Arun, thus parting with it for the first time in the day. “It’s good if she can study here. UP colleges do not know how to accommodate blind students. They don’t have facilities for them, they don’t even give them scribes for exams,” he says, to no one in particular.

One would have thought Dharamwati’s smile could not get any brighter, until she emerged from the registration room. She’s pulled a fast one; and has chosen Indraprastha College for Women as her priority. History is still her favourite subject, mostly because it is an ‘easy’ optional for the Civil Services exams. “My second preference is Miranda House,” she says, adding, “I have chosen Lady Shri Ram too, but it’s not on top.”

The smile is firmly in place.

Indian Express

Do Kids with Disabilities Strain or Strengthen Our Schools?

Posted by: Anne Newman on September 27

So what goes through your mind when you see a child with cerebral palsy using a wheelchair, an adolescent with the social short-circuiting of Aspergers, or a kid whose speech isn’t as quick and facile as his peers? Few of us are as candid as my friend Dan Habib about the prejudice he once held against kids and adults with disabilities. “When I saw people who couldn’t walk or talk … It’s painful to admit, but I often saw them as less smart, less capable, and not worth getting to know.”  That was a lifetime ago. Specifically, the life of Dan’s son, Samuel, a fourth grader with cerebral palsy whose odysseys and those of four others with disabilities are chronicled in Dan’s award-winning documentary, Including Samuel. The film chronicles the efforts of Dan, his wife, Betsy, and their older son, Isaiah, to involve Samuel in every part of their lives and in the public schools in their hometown of Concord, N.H. When I first blogged about the film in May it had just been featured on the likes of Good Morning America and NPR’s All Things Considered and was catching on among advocates of inclusion, as Dan says, “giving all individuals equal opportunity to learn and engage with their peers.” The film has since spanned the globe with screenings from Iraq to Belgium and throughout this country with showings and discussions at universities, school districts, and disability rights conferences. And Samuel, whom I first met when he was a baby at a Thanksgiving dinner shared by our two extended families, has since developed fascinations held not so long ago by my sixth-grade son: the Titanic and all things related to it, the deafening roar of a throng of boys cheering their wooden race cars over the finish line in that annual Cub Scout ritual, the pinewood derby.

With National Disability Employment Awareness Month (October) around the corner, the Habibs have taken the film and their campaign for inclusion up a few more levels: Including Samuel is about to air across the nation on PBS broadcasts supported by the National Inclusion Project and CVS Caremark All Kids Can, a CVS program to help kids with disabilities. Isaiah has helped put together a “teen movie party toolkit,” encouraging kids to set up their own screenings of the film with their friends and posing questions only an 8th grader like himself could ask: “Have you ever seen kids in wheelchairs being pushed down the hall of your school by someone that looks like they’re thinking about retirement?” And Dan, once a national award-winning photographer for the Concord Monitor and a Pulitzer Prize jurist this year, now supports his work and family as the filmmaker in residence at the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire.

But in this economy, just how much enthusiasm is Dan getting for inclusion? Not everyone is a fan—not by a long shot, judging by some of the comments on my blog last May. While the vast majority of commenters agreed that inclusion should be the next civil rights movement, there were dissenters. “Why do we even bother paying for education for these kids?,” wrote a commenter named Lilly. “Their parents chose to have kids and now their disability and special needs amount to a rise in taxes. Their parents just get a lawyer and fight and fight until the school district ends up paying for special programs. Why? Why not divert the funds for gifted and talented students instead of kids who will need societal support their whole life.”

Lilly’s anger about how taxpayers’ money is spent is not unheard of. How many of us have heard the same complaint in our own school districts? And how many Lillys does Dan run into on his travels?

I pitched that question to him by e-mail, and he replied with a list of “myths and realities” about inclusion. One myth, he says, is the notion that taxpayers are throwing away money by educating kids with disabilities. His response: “How can Lilly or anyone else predict which child will contribute to our society? Would Lilly really argue that Bernie Madoff … added more to the world than the physicist Stephen Hawking (who wrote his greatest work after he was severely disabled by ALS)? How about Albert Einstein (widely thought to have had Asperger Syndrome), Helen Keller (blind, deaf, and unable to speak) and Vincent Van Gogh (mentally ill)? People are not limited by their disability, they are limited by a lack of opportunity.”

Another complaint? “Inclusion just stresses out teachers and takes away from the education of the ‘other’ kids.” Says Dan: “Nearly every teacher I have met in my travels has told me that teaching kids of varying abilities and learning styles has made them a better teacher. Inclusion has reinforced the importance of cutting-edge teaching methods like differentiated instruction, co-teaching, and universally designed curriculum, which benefit all kids in the classroom.”

What about it, readers? If you attended a school that included students with special needs, what was your experience? Have your attitudes about such children changed over the years? Do students with disabilities in your schools learn along with their peers? Are your schools strained or strengthened by including them?

Business Week