36 Teachers to Pursue Masters Degrees in Special Ed.
A group of thirty-six educators has embarked upon a master’s program in special education. Through the University of the West Indies, the Government of Belize is covering roughly sixty percent of the cost of tuition for the enrolled teachers. This morning at a ceremony at the Radisson, Minister of Education Patrick Faber was on hand to acknowledge the cohort.
Patrick Faber, Minister of Education
“Special education is an area of special concern for our ministry. In fact, quite often I’ve lamented that it is an area that we very much need to pay more attention and put more resources into. We don’t have nearly enough teachers to help us with this issue of special education and while it is we can’t have a special education teacher in every school, what we’re aiming to do here is to create a cohort of experts that will then be able to be of better support for teachers so that they can conduct inclusive education in regular schools. So it is the ministry putting its money where its mouth is, we are now committed, I suspect with the increase that I approved just a few minutes ago, we’re about probably sixty percent of the program being paid for by the government through the taxpaying dollars and then those recipients will have to pay the additional. It’s a two-year program and so after just two short years we should be better equipped to handle our students who are of special needs in this country.”
Patrick Faber
Isani Cayetano
“What is the size of this cohort of teachers?”
Patrick Faber
“It is thirty-six teachers and they are not all teachers, some of them in fact are from the Ministry of Education so it is our experts, our special education officers who don’t have the formal training and we believe can benefit from this kind of training. All of these thirty-six recipients in fact are already working with our students with special needs and so it is merely to ensure that they have those strategies, the know-how, if you will, in order to better effect a quality education for this component of our population that has been underserved.”
