Dwar Jingkyrmen School for Children in need, Meghalaya

Professionally I was a Tea Planter. Our younger daughter was born in 1972, little did we know that Nahid would be a child with profound mental and physical disabilities. With her epileptic fits noticed at the age of two and a half months we took her to the best of neurologists in the country, in Calcutta, Delhi, Vellore and Madras. The AIIMS, Delhi diagnosed her as a child with a degenerative terminal ailment and gave her a life span of only three years and today she is thirty eight years of age.

There was no school for my child anywhere in the North East albeit it was her birth right to get to a school. I gave up my job. My wife having done her Bachelor of teaching way back in 1967 went to Calcutta to The Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy for a few short term courses on Disability.

With a little knowledge acquired from theory and practice we began teaching Nahid. We thought of other parents who also had Nahids and assumed these parents might like to share their experiences with us. That was the beginning.

We approached the Ladies and Children's Recreation Centre, of which my late mother in - law Mrs. Shafiqua Husain was the President, if it would be interested in taking up a School as one of its Projects.

The Recreation Centre had held a meeting on 8th of July 1986 and offered us its premises to start a school for the disabled.

A friend from Bombay sent us two therapists from the Jai Vakeel School For Special Education which was the first and the largest school for the challenged in Asia.

These two therapists were our initial guide, we started off with two children-Nahid and Prashanto on the 1st of August 1986 and within the month there were eighteen students. We called the school, School For Children In Need of Special Education, a name copied from Jai Vakeel Institution, Bombay which is known as the Research Society for the Care, Treatment and Training of Children in need of Special Care.

A very close friend of the family late Mrs. Bonili Khongmen was sincerely associated with this School. We requested this lady for a Khasi name for the school and she very kindly thought of Dwar Jingkyrmen-the "Gateway of Hope". We the parents always live on hope with a prayer that our children will progress even if it is only one step at a time and the span of time may be a year or years or till eternity.

In the following year we affiliated ourselves with the Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy, Calcutta and were monitored and guided by the Special Educators from Calcutta.

A few years later our elder daughter qualified as a Special Educator and joined us. Ridalyne joined in 1990 and in five years time she was sent to I.I.C.P., Calcutta to study the course of Special Education. Today we have eight qualified Special Educators and four teachers with Masters Degree, a Physiotherapist and two teachers in charge of the Vocational Training Units and one taking care of the out station students.

Life has never been easy in the School, the greatest hurdle being Finance. We are financed by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India with a recommendation of the Department of Social Welfare, Government of Meghalaya. The Ministry gives us approximately sixty percent of our requirement and the rest we need to raise.

With the increase in the number of students it was difficult to carry on in the Recreation Centre's Building and we had to think of a Building to accommodate the students.

Our Parent body, the Ladies and Children's Recreation Centre organized a "walk" to raise funds which helped in the construction of the first building.

Further finance came mostly from our family and friends and money was also raised by the parents of the students and the amount spent up-to-date on the construction is 32, 00,000 rupees.

In the year 2005 the Department of Youth Affairs and Sports, Government of Meghalaya made our Basketball Court and this year we received a Grant of 3, 15, 000 rupees from the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports Government of India to construct a Swimming Pool.

I must also mention Kong Etimon Nongtdu from a village in Jaintia Hills, our student Batskhem grandmother who collects the coins from her little shop daily and donates the entire collection of coins to this School at the end of the year, every year.

In our formative years the School was only a Day Care Centre with children of different types of disabilities clubbed together to just enjoy the hours they were here and learn the Daily Living Skills and Social Acceptability.

We are grateful to Bethany Society that it opened for children with Hearing and Visual Impairment and a Vocational Training Centre where our children with similar disabilities could enroll.

Dwar Jingkyrmen restricted itself to children and young adults with Mental Retardation, Cerebral Palsy and Multiple Disabilities and of late introduced a Unit for Children with Autism with two teachers who had received placement at the Autism Society of West Bengal, Kolkatta.

The Services we offer are

1. Centre For Special Education
2. Pre Vocational Training Unit
3. Out Students Division
4. Unit For Autistic Spectrum Disorder
5. Home Based Rehabilitation Programme
6. Parent Involvement Programme
7. Respite Care Services
8. Referral Services
9. Awareness Programme
10.  Stonyland Inclusive School for Pre Nursery, Nursery and Kindergarten
11. Human Resource Development

Out of these the Respite Care Service which was completely funded by Johnson and Johnson Ltd, Mumbai has accommodation for four students for overnight stay in case the parents need to be out of station.

The Inclusive School was started in 2010 with one child diagnosed as being Autistic. This School now has sixteen children where the able and the challenged study together. We wish to have two children with special Needs in a class of twenty five. Our goal is to add one class per year and raising it to the Class XII.

In the Human Resource Development Unit we have the trainee nurses from the Civil Hospital, Ganesh Das Hospital and the Woodland Hospital. We have In Service Training for Staff and Training for Mainstream School Teachers on "Learning Difficulties and Remedial Education" The Educating Methods of Children with Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Dysgraphia and Dyspraxia are the prime subjects.

We have also the Study Centre for the B.ED Special Education-a Course introduced by North Eastern Hill University in 2007 under the Rehabilitation Council of India.

Under the National Trust in its Rural Programme we worked among the disabled in the villages of East Khasi Hills, Jaintia Hills, West Khasi Hills and Ri Bhoi districts covering 139 villages and reaching towards 437 disabled persons and their families.

The Management of the School is taken care by the Governing Body elected by the Members - every parent is a member of the General Body; elections are held in the Annual General Meetings.

The School today has 125 students and 1045 children and young adults have been benefited through this School in the last 25 years.

In the year 2010 we started the Stonyland Primary School; it is an Inclusive School where the able and the challenged study together. At present it has a Play School for the age group of two and a half years, a Nursery and a Kindergarten. A promotional   class will be added year after year taking it to class twelve level in due course.