Visit: Morning Star AND Speaker: Dr. Samuel Hayford UPDATED

This morning we went to Morning Star School, a private and very well-ranked school in Accra. It serves children K-9^th grade, and has around 1,070 students. This was a very different experience from our visit to the School for the Deaf in Tema yesterday. Being a privately run institution means that it has a multitude of resources that are not available to the public schools. I found it interesting that the headmistress admonished us to not judge anything in the school as inferior to what we already know, because even from my own experiences growing up, I thought it was a first rate school. The quality of the teachers, just from the brief bits that I saw, was very high. They seemed to truly care about the students and focus on their education. There were multiple computer labs, and everything was very well organized and in working order. In contrast, I didn't see any computer labs at the school for the deaf yesterday (but that doesn't mean they weren't there, I just didn't see any), and the playground was in a state of disrepair.

The headmistress also mentioned to us that at one point they only had a 77% rate of distinction (which from what I gathered means honors, or very high marks) on their exams, but that most public schools would find that rate to be very satisfactory. She said she was disappointed in that number, and investigated because normally the entire school achieves highly on tests. From what I understand, this is the type of school you send your child to if you want them to rise academically. Most of the students I talked to wanted to have good professions: one girl wanted to be a doctor, another girl wanted to go to Oxford and be an architect, and one boy wanted to be a mechanical engineer. This is quite a difference from the examples of occupational aspirations that were given to us by the director of the School for the Deaf.

I am hoping we get to visit a public school in Accra so we have another example to compare with this school. I think that the visit today showed us what children and schools are like when there are virtually no challenges to the students getting a quality education. I only wish there were more schools like this that were accessible to all, regardless of income level or disability.

 

We had a lecture from Dr. Samuel Hayford this afternoon about special education in Ghana. He gave us information on the history of special education here, policies and legislation, as well as plans for the future. Their goal is to have inclusion of children with disabilities into the regular schools by 2015. This seems rather ambitious as it is already 2013, especially since there are 12 schools for students with hearing impairments, 2 schools for students with visual impairments (as well as 2 schools already practicing inclusion), and 9 specific schools for students with intellectual disabilities. He said that currently there are more students on the waiting list to get into these special schools than there are actual students enrolled in them. Fitting the needs of all these students is not going to be an easy task. But the rewards of inclusion schools outweighs the difficulty of implementing them. For one thing, the specialized schools are few and far between, which means children who don't live near them probably aren't able to access them, which means they may not go to school at all. I think another benefit of inclusions schools is that it makes disability something that school children will be exposed to in the classroom, which with time could help remove the stigma.

I really enjoyed his lecture, and it made me more aware of all of the issues surrounding the special education system in Ghana. Ghana was one of the first countries to sign the Salamanca Statement in 1994, and though it has taken them awhile to getting around to implementing it, I hope their example will inspire other countries to do the same.