Community Support for Students with Special Needs

[Anne Jakins]

Community Support for Students with Learning Difficulties

Where is the community support for students with special needs?

In parts of America businesses show meaningful commitment to raise achievement in local schools in order to produce potential employees with an awareness of citizenship, positive self esteem and improved job skills.

Does anyone have experience of the following?

· Extensive after school programmes for disaffected students financed by local businesses

· Collaboration between local employers and schools to provide valued job skills , particularly for those on reduced curriculum courses

· Local business people involved in school projects not just providing financial support but giving up their own time to help students.

Can the community help to improve the calibre of students coming on to the local job market?

Anne Jakins

[Jean Walker]

We do quite a lot of this kind of thing in Tasmania. It's done in preference to puuting kids into special units. Often they do part time school and part time community work/activities. We have something called The Shed where local people give up their time to work with disengaged students on practical projects. We also have a partnership with local councils in a program to rebuild stolen cars and return them to their owners. There are others too numerous to mention here. There is a major Expo on in Sydney in June called Learning Choices which is going to showcase this kind of education. You might be able to find their site with an Australian search engine such as Yahoo Australia.