Find your way in this world
There is a wonderful boarding school for children with poor eyesight in Zhytomyr oblast. However, there is no similar institution for those who are completely blind.
Eyesight provides a person with 80 to 90 percent of all the information about the surrounding environment.
The World Health Organization says that every year the number of blind people on the planet goes up by one million, every five seconds an adult looses his eyesight, and every minute a child does.
According to the latest estimates, there are more than 300,000 blind people in Ukraine nowadays.
Every year doctors discover problems with eyesight in 150,000 children, says Serhii Rykov, Ukraine’s chief ophthalmologist. Over 3,000 people are given disability status due to problems with eyesight.
At the moment, the number of employed people with eyesight disabilities is only 6,000, according to the data provided by the computer center of Blind People’s Society of Ukraine.
Doctors stress that early diagnostics and preventive measures can prevent blindness and secure healthy eyesight.
Zhytomyr — A class of third-graders in Specialized Boarding School No. 11 for children with poor eyesight in Zhytomyr. The teacher, Liudmyla Kravets, is explaining to her students with great patience the basics of counting and solving problems. She is a professional and the confidence with which she is working proves it. The kids are trying to do their best, even though they cannot do everything right away. As usual, there are some who are more active than others: here is a cute girl, Tania, who is raising her hand all the time with a desire to answer the teacher’s questions. Then everybody (there are two more girls and a boy in the classroom) start carefully drawing lines in their copybooks. They are using not only a pencil for this purpose but also a huge magnifier made of very thick glass.
The children in the boarding school have different levels of eyesight loss — they still can see, even tough not much. There are 112 of them, including 10 that study at home. Some of them are mentally retarded, and it makes the process of teaching them more complicated. Most of these children came from raions and on weekends they go home. Forty-seven kids have the visually handicapped status, while 12 are orphans or children without parental care. The period of studies is one year longer than in ordinary secondary schools.
The director of boarding school, Anatolii Palamarchuk, told The Day that the number of visually impaired children is growing. The reason is the time they spend since their childhood years in front of computers and TV sets. His motto is that children need to be taught in such a way that they would have knowledge and certain skills, and hence would be competitive in their adult life.
The boarding school provides general secondary education. This year the graduates of the school took the tests of the independent evaluation just like the students from other schools did and passed them successfully. The director also said that some special conditions, such bright lights, have to be provided for these children so that they would be able to take the tests. The best students of the boarding school continue their education in universities, colleges of Zhytomyr, in the Ohienko College of Culture and Arts, and other institutions. Those who did not enrol in a higher educational establishment go on to acquire working skills in a special lyceum for disabled people in Zhytomyr.
Two school buildings, in addition to the workshops and other buildings, have been nicely renovated recently. Now they have not only well-lit classrooms, but also comfortable bedrooms, a dining room, a playroom, and a gym — everything that is needed for productive studies and recreation.
The director says he is worried not so much about the problems of the boarding school itself (there is nothing to complain about really), but about the future of its students. In his opinion, the state has to take more care of them, particularly in what concerns their wages or auxiliary aid, especially with housing. He added that under certain conditions the boarding school could accommodate children who have completely lost their eyesight. Some parents have asked for this already. However, this requires some major revamp, additional staff, and extra money.
When The Day asked in the relevant agencies about any plans along this line, a surprising revelation emerged: they do not know how many children with complete loss of eyesight are there in the oblast. Oleksandr Pastovensky, head of the Directorate for Education and Science at the regional state administration, frankly admitted that his agency has never addressed this problem and surmised that it may not be urgent. Moreover, in crisis conditions any major revamps are problematic. He assured us that this issue will be addressed in the future.
Special boarding schools for visually handicapped children operate in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, and some other cities. However, for the majority of parents or guardians who live in remote areas it is a challenge to bring children to these schools. The high transportation fare rates are one problem; the requirement to take children home for weekends is another. But the worst is the fact that neither society nor the government cares about having a real picture of the situation in which these children found themselves.
