And while that special needs child is in the wind, a pair of retired teachers want to make sure children with those kinds of needs have greater educational options. Dr. Lorna Bennett and Louisa Sanchez left Belize nearly five decades ago and migrated to Canada where they both became highly trained and specialized educators. They work with special needs children and that means kids who have difficulty learning, visual and perceptual difficulties, mild sensory deficits, language deficits, and social skills deficits. And now that they are in semi retirement, they want to bring their considerable skill set to help Belizean children. Yesterday, they told us a little bit about their grand plan.
Dr. Lorna Bennett - Belizean-Canadian Educator
"Now, we have decided that we would like to address the needs in Belize of children that are having learning difficulties. We are calling it the Bennett Sanchez Diagnostic Teaching Center because we are not just going to evaluate children, but we hope to hire people to tutor those children based on programmes we set up for them after finding out what their difficulties are."
Jules Vasquez
"Often times, perhaps too often, in school, a child is unable to learn - the child is just seen as 'duncey'."
Dr. Lorna Bennett
"Kids with learning difficulties often have regular IQ, and some are gifted even if they have a deficit in a certain area. There can be more than one area, but often, you can target where the weakness is and work in that area to help them."
Louisa Sanchez - Belizean-Canadian Educator
"What we look at are the different strategies that we need for those kids that need to have that and then from there - we have parental consent and from there we get trained people. I was one of those; I had to take a whole lot of training in Autism, Down Syndrome."
Dr. Lorna Bennett
"A lot of the times once a kid finds that they can learn, they move fast. Because what has happened is they are discouraged and one of the aspects of learning disabilities that people tend not to think about is fear, because if you fail you start being afraid. That fear has to be addressed and that child has to learn that even though you're afraid you have to keep trying. When you're hurting from not learning - where they place you is quite significant because you already feel less, and if you're put in a place and you're not sure what it is, your self-esteem is eroding again. It's not impossible to help them if we decide we will, and I think that's where it's at. We are committed to it; we're both highly skilled professionals. We both know what we're talking about and we know how to teach"
Bennett and Sanchez are using their own money to do this and they stress they are not millionaires. They are setting up a non profit and hoping to qualify for international grants.
They plan to provide free testing for children and want parents to pay for tutoring. We'll keep following their effort, which is in its very nascent stages.
Email
Print