Make schools better places to study

Dear editor,

Regarding the April 20 editorial, ``Let's Make a Difference,'' I believe members of our society must open their minds further and try to live together with the disabled without any prejudice and discrimination against them even in an immersion educational school setting.

As an experienced teacher, I'd like to make some suggestions about the issue. First of all, considering the disabled students' condition, school layouts must be designed more cautiously.

A large number of schools still don't have appropriate facilities such as gently sloped stairs, wheelchair ramps, some bars in the hallways, elevators and so on. Physically challenged students can move more conveniently and easily with the assistance of improved facilities.

Moreover, the ratio of specially-trained teachers for the disabled students should be increased in accordance with the level of disability.

Currently, no matter how severe the difficulties the special-needs students suffer, according to the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education annual plan of 2009, every teacher should take care of five students per classroom.

This doesn't seem to make sense. The national budget should be increased to train and place more of these teachers. The teacher to student ratio should be adjusted elastically depending on the students' levels of disability.

In the name of immersion education, all students are apt to study together in a classroom without consideration of the degree of impairment. If the students are suffering from a serious condition like first degree cerebral palsy, they can't easily communicate with others.

Without consideration of the level, mentally disabled students could suffer more severely from isolation. Since they can't express their needs in a proper way and at the right time, other students can't help them enough and there could be misunderstandings between them.

Sometimes the disabled students can interrupt the other students in class without realizing it; this could be reverse discrimination for the rest of the students, too.

In order not to instigate more complicated problems, a more careful second thought is very necessary. And only if we raise awareness of the special-needs students and reduce the possibility of misunderstanding between them and their counterparts can we make our schools better places to study.

Yoo Ji-wan jinny2599@naver.com