The answer was a surprisingly resounding yes!
Two years ago, Ed, the Mountain Man of Sagada helped arrange a gathering wherein parents of children with special needs were invited to come to the town proper's municipal town hall with their children to meet the members of Center for Possibilities Foundation Inc.Twenty eight sets of parents arrived with their children aged 3 to 23 of varying degrees of disability. Most had never been diagnosed, much less treated. Most had never experienced therapy intervention. Most had never seen the inside of a classroom. All had parents who were often nonplussed about their circumstances and could do little else than just love and care for their children as best as they knew how. All had never met strangers like ourselves caring about their condition and prospects.
What ensued was a getting to know you session, where the Possibilities Foundation members asked each parent what their life was like, how they'd managed, what they felt, what they hoped for. Tears flowed readily that day, with the parents wondering whether they'd dare to hope that some relief was in sight for their children.
It took nearly two years to mobilize a task force from Manila to take on the task of determining the baseline readiness of the children for education. The Center for Possibilities Foundation members returned to Sagada with teachers from Reach International School in tow to attempt to assess the same children as to their educational levels and potentials for training. This time, more than 28 children showed up with their parents for assessment.
Mayor Ed Lawatan of Sagada's appointed Vice Mayor Ben Capuyan and Councilor Jane of the Sangguniang Bayan to work with the Center for Possibilities Foundation to hammer out a memorandum of understanding that would lead to the opening of sped classes for the disabled of Sagada. Discussions between the local government unit representatives and Center for Possibilities Foundation resulted in the main agreement that the Pilot
Sped Program would be held in a special classroom in Sagada's Central School, and would begin in August - September of 2015!
Teachers native to Sagada were recruited, interviewed, tested, and hired, and are thus scheduled to be trained in Manila to handle the several different levels of Sped classes to accommodate the enthusiastic turnout. Parents are being invited to help out the teachers in maintaining cleanliness and gentle order in the classroom. A system of monitoring and quality control involving the Reach International School will also be in place to ensure that the Pilot Sped Program in Sagada enjoys some measure of success especially for its precious student population who have waited for this program for so long.
This is one of the first comprehensive learning provincial outreach projects launched by the Center for Possibilities Foundation Inc. in keeping with its slogan "From Disabled to Enabled".... Others in the pipeline include similar pilot Sped programs in hurricane battered Tacloban in Leyte, and industrial town Norzagaray in Bulacan.
The Possibilities Foundation members are slated to return to Sagada at the end of August to sign the memorandum of agreement and to open the first Sped classes Sagada has ever seen.
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