№ 64 (3214)

25.04.2006

Kazan bureaucracy is going to close down a school for handicapped children, which is unique in the whole Russia.

In 1992 some mothers of children with serious diseases and limited physical possibilities went marching on the main place and applied to the President M. Shaymiyev: Let our children communicate with other children, learn and live a normal live, please! They cannot go to common schools! President had heard the prayer and in some month a rehabilitation center on Zorge street was opened, where the children are treated (that means treatment procedures, massage, help of a defectologist...) and learn like every healthy child of this age – in usual classes.

This "school" component made the Kazan rehabilitation center unique; there is no such center even in Moscow. That’s why parents bring their children here from the capital, from Saratov, from Vladivostok, from Yerevan... People leave their lodgings, give up their work and go to Kazan with only one goal — to give their children good education, that means: to give them a chance. Though the children are bounded physically, they are intelligent, after all. 11 of 25 graduates of the center (there were two graduations meanwhile) entered high schools, 6 – technical (secondary) schools. If these children would be teached at home as it is provided (8 educational hours a week and only 9 classes), studying would be out of the question.

Recently the parents of the pupils of the rehabilitation center got to know, that the school would soon be closed. As it turned out the bureaucracy found the "school component" superfluous... The point is that the guidance of the center on Zorge-street will soon be changed – it is municipal now, and it is going to become state-controlled - under direct control of the Ministry of Social protection of the Republic of Tatarstan. The new heads think that one cannot treat and teach the children at once, so educational services cannot find a right place in a hospital. The bureaucracy follows the letter of the law, they say, and the law does not allow mixing a school and a rehabilitation center. The "social protectors" do not want to think of the fact, that rehabilitation is not only massage and treatment; they do not want to agree upon saving the school with the Ministry of Education.

- As they were told that the school is going to be closed, our children cry uninterruptedly: "What should we do now?"

The handicapped children learn in common schools only on the West; yet we are very far from this now! - the mothers of the pupils find.

- My son is absolutely normal at the first sight, yet he has a prosthetic device instead of the right hand. As he went to an access course before school, other children badgered him so, that he refused to go to school at all, - Gulyusa Fattakhova, the mother of a third-form boy Rustem told me. - He had been visiting a normal school three years long and then we came to this center, now we cannot recognize our child – here he has learned to enjoy the life!

The fifth-form boy Ruslan, who does not have any fingers has also visited a common school and did not endure the mockery, though the boy is not easily frightened. What is to say about children whose diagnosis is cerebral spastic infantile paralysis: Masha remembers her "common" kindergarten like a night mare, Nail prefers not to walk down his own street without any need, for other children cry behind his back: "Are you drunken?"

- Not only mockery makes the common schools terrible, - Albina Khairetdinova explains (her son is a pupil, and she is a teacher in the rehabilitation center). - The schools are not adjusted to unusual demands; there are even no ramps. In our school children sit in one classroom and the teachers come to them, and in a normal school the children have to change rooms and stores. The children are brought in and out of the school by bus, an extra helper, Yuriy Pavlovich, supports them by moving across the room; it is not possible in a common school! There is not any extra school for our children - there are only schools for retarded or for ill children, who can serve themselves. Our children can be teached only at home.

- I cannot understand it, for teaching at home is much more expensive for our state, than a school, - another mother and teacher Guzel Fakhreyeva wonders. Her son, a ninth-form boy Marat can move only using a wheel chair. Marat is an excellent pupil and can draw perfectly. What is more profitable for the state: welfare payments or teaching a good art designer, who will have many customers in the future?.. Recently Marat Fakhreyev like two other pupils of the center has won a language competition and has become a prize: a trip to the USA.

- It means, the USA is ready to receive us, to let us have very good conditions 10 month long, we are invited to live in a family. And here in the native land the state just wants to hide our children away? - Guzel Fakhreyeva tries to understand the reasons of the state social politic.

..."If I just hinder everybody, why did not they kill me just after my birth? Why did they let me suffer?" – the mother of handicapped children are afraid of this question most of all. It is very hard to explain, why people in our land do not like them, yet don’t throw them down from a high rock like people in the ancient Sparta used to do... They do not say "invalid" now in Russian, they say "a man with limited possibilities", yet the sense of the social politic is ever the same – the state just puts up with the invalids...

Olga MACHNEVA.