All twenty-four primary school principals interviewed said they have not turned away any child with disabilities who have applied to their school. This could be because parents know schools that don’t have ramps, bathroom, furniture and equipment to accommodate children with disabilities so they don’t bother to apply to them. Belize has no accessibility to school legislation for children with disabilities.
7.3.3 NaRCIE Children at primary and secondary school ages with disabilities are encouraged and facilitated to attend regular schools by the Ministry of Education through the National Resource Center for Inclusive Education (NaRCIE). NaRCIE’s mandate is to “ensure that All our children [with disabilities] are provided with equitable opportunities to achieve his/her individual best in all aspects of life”. This Center started in January 1991 as the Special Education Unit (SEU) but was refocused and renamed NaRCIE in 2007. Over the years the department has evolved into a well recognized department in the Ministry of Education that contributes to the attainment of the Rights of the Child, rights under other international conventions and declarations, and national laws, policies and plans (e.g., the National Plan of Action). All this is done through inclusive education which is operationalized using UNESCO’s definition of inclusive education and inclusive schools as follows.
propriate learning opportunities to students to participate actively in the classroom learning activities and to expect all students to behave with respect for the learning of others. A school’s obligation in promoting inclusive education is to place students in age-appropriate regular classrooms, to provide an environment that is inviting, pleasant, clean, and accessible to ALL students, and to provide a positive Inclusive Climate through policies, programs and practices that are equitable for students. NaRCIE reaches children with Exceptional Learning Needs (ELN) through referrals from schools and on an informal level a few cases are referred to the Itinerant Resource Officer (IRO) by parents and individuals who know about their work. A few others are discovered by the IROs when they encounter a child they suspect has a special need. In the latter the IRO might be on a bus, and a conversation with the child or the parent would reveal that the child is not attending school. Recommendations and follow-ups would typically be made for the child to attend school.
IROs work with children in the schools. There is a total of 11 IROs, four in Belize district, two each in Orange Walk and Cayo districts, and one each in Corozal, Stann Creek and Toledo districts. These officers are trained in various aspects of special education with an average of fifteen years working with children with disabilities. The NaRCIE staff is well qualified with eleven having master’s degrees, two with bachelors and two with associates degrees. There is one itinerant teacher who is a trained teacher at This approach requires teachers to provide apthe associate degree level with over fifteen years of teaching experience. The staff all participate in at least one in-service training each quarter. Inclusive Education is a system in which all pupils with special educational needs are enrolled The IROs cannot service all the chilin ordinary classes in their district schools, and dren in the more than 40 to 50 schools are provided with support services and an edassigned to each of them because the ucation based on their strengths and needs. number is large, limited departmenInclusive Schools are based on the basic printal transportation and/or inconvenient ciple that all school children in a given commupublic transportation, and limited finance to cover cost of visits, especially nity should learn together, so far as is practito San Pedro and Caye Caulker. Accal, regardless of their handicaps or difficulties. cording to NaRCIE’s 2010-2011 annual (UNESCO, 2002) report there were 1783 referrals and 770 clients. Clients are children who have been assessed by an IRO and referrals are those who have been referred to NaRCIE by a school but have not yet been
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