These schools will serve as “laboratories” and help solve problems of inclusive education through the identification of problem areas, and through innovative solutions that will allow differently abled children to study in mainstream schools using to the CBSE syllabus.

Twelve schools belonging to the Directorate of Education (DoE), and a similar number of schools run by the MCD, will be part of this project, Education Secretary Rina Ray said. “It’s not possible to blindly follow the model of education followed in the US or Europe. This will allow us to see what is required in the specific environment of Delhi government schools,” she said. One DoE and MCD school in each education district will be developed as a model school.

The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’s Delhi office has taken out an advertisement inviting 50 teachers for children with special needs, including visual and hearing-impaired children. The teachers will be posted in these model schools to enable the DoE to work out guidelines for expanding the integrated education model.

In 2008, there were 10,065 differently abled children enrolled in 750 Delhi government schools. Most have some physical disability or visual or auditory impairment. Some also have learning disabilities like dyslexia. “Most schools today have some number of children with disabilities but there are no fixed methods to teach them. There is too much diversity in Delhi and too little awareness or expertise as far as dealing with these children is concerned,” Kanta Kapoor, coordinator, District Southwest, Integrated Education for Disabled Children, said.

The model schools will have both the infrastructure and the trained teachers required to integrate the children with disabilities. “We are in talks with the Vinyas Foundation to create Building as Learning Aid (Bala) concepts for children with visual impairment or learning disability. We are also working out retrofitting and renovation plans to introduce ramps, wider doors, specially designed toilets etc, for these children,” Ray said.

NGOs such as the Spastic Society of North India, Muskaan, Aastha etc, have also been involved in the project for spreading awareness and contribution of expertise to the scheme. The Vinyas Foundation, which introduced the Bala idea, has been roped in to create more such aids for these children. “We are thinking about getting tiles that indicate directions to blind students, painting scenes out of stories on walls so that children with hearing impairment can see the story that they are not able to hear,” the Education Secretary said.Under the proposed plan, all teachers and students in these schools will be sensitised to the needs of the differently abled students, through workshops and life skills education programmes. Two teachers from every school under the DoE have already been identified as in-charge of the special education programme. Workshops were held last year to train them in methods to integrate children with disabilities. Sensitisation drives were also organised across schools in December to create awareness about the problems faced by differently abled children.