By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
Criticism is mounting on schools that did not allow disabled students from taking Tuesday's standardized state-run exam.
Parents groups claimed the schools discriminated against the children, whose school records were lower than ordinary students on average, in order to raise the schools' ranking.
Officials of an elementary school in southern Seoul earlier decided that four mentally and physically disabled children should not take the test, which a parent reported anonymously to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, claiming it was discrimination.
School officials said they did so because they were concerned that students were likely to have difficulty in taking the test due to the long hours. The school said a day before the test that it would allow students to take the exam if the students' parents wished, but that the parents declined.
At another primary school in Seoul, two out of the school's four handicapped students took the test, but the school did not include their scores among its official test results.
As for criticism that the school attempted to reduce the number of students with low scores, it said that each school principal is allowed to decide whether to include grades of children receiving ``special education'' in the school's total records.
In Gwangju, the city's education office sent schools an official document in which it ordered each school to decide whether to have students in special education classes take the exam. Some civic groups are claiming that the education office's direction itself was also discrimination against the disabled.
At an elementary school where disabled and non-disabled students receive the same lessons, teachers did not distribute the test paper to the former, and those students had to sit idly by while other children took the exam.
Some 10 schools with separate classrooms for handicapped children gave them regular lessons instead of the test.
A civic association for educational rights for the disabled in Gwangju asked in a statement, ``Can a school be an educational venue if it excludes disabled students from a test in order to raise its ranking?'' and continued ``The educational authorities are encouraging discrimination against the disabled.''
The group said it is absurd to ban disabled students, who were willing to take the test, from doing so, while some 1,400 students opposing the uniform exam boycotted the test and went on field trips nationwide. ``The authorities said the test was designed to determine students' scholastic levels and teach them according to it. So, excluding disabled students is against the purpose of the exam,'' the association said.