Who is popular today?

Child psychologist Dr Orlean Brown-Earle has proposed that a training and sensitisation programme be implemented in rural Jamaica to aid teachers and parents in understanding and interact with their autistic children.Brown-Earle, in an interview with the Jamaica Observer, said while she has started pooling her resources and getting other psychologists on board in an effort to get these classes started, it has been difficult because she is nowhere near to getting the amount of money needed to rent the locations and provide the psychologists with a stipend for each session.Therefore, she is inviting interested persons to provide assistance in whatever way they can."I'm willing to work with anybody who is willing to partner with us to get the help, especially before school starts full-time. The more we can go out there to train the teachers, the better, because many teachers would have done an introduction to special education course, but you know that's probably a 45-minute course. But in terms of dealing with issues four, five [or] six hours a day, how do they work with them? How do they deal with them?" Brown-Earle asked."I am trying to roll out something where we can actually go into school, train the teachers - especially the teachers at the early levels, for example grades one to three. we want to focus, we want to get the children in their classrooms with their intellectual deficits and autism and show them [the teachers] how to work with them specifically. but as you can imagine that takes funding, so, I'm trying to see how I can get that done because it's so needed," she continued.Suggesting that a high percentage of children are born with autism in Jamaica, Brown-Earle confirmed that, "Another major part of the population I want to reach are childcare centres because I'm realising now we have a large percentage of childcare facilities who do after-care. What I realise is a lot of the owners of these service providers want to learn how [to] work with these children in the afternoon. For example, the school has what they call an individualised education plan for the child, how can [they] be a part of that to work with the child for three or four hours in the afternoon until the parents come and take the child."Brown-Earle went on to say that the programme would have a multidisciplinary approach in which speech therapy will be provided for those children who need it, counselling for the children, and educational sessions for teachers and parents to inform on how to interact with their child."The children are being born with disabilities, we can't pretend about it, but how do we help the families and the schools to provide the best potential for children to maximise their skills is what is going to be important," Brown-Earle told the Sunday Observer, saying that she works in Westmoreland, Manchester, St Elizabeth and Clarendon, and on a daily basis she is assessing at least three children a day with autism.She also noted that for the training and sensitisation, each two hour session is estimated to cost about $50,000."You would want to do as much face-to-face as possible, so if I am to pay a psychologist, a speech therapist and probably a parent facilitator, you are looking at probably a minimum of $50,000 per session, like a two hour session...And because of COVID now we can't do large groups, so probably a group of 15 or 20 [people] at a time," she clarified, noting that she is targeting the rural areas because they have less access to this kind of treatment.Brown-Earle, who is also a lecturer at Northern Caribbean University, acknowledged that although the Ministry of Education has a special education programme, it is not the same as the programme she is working to implement."This kind of one-on-one training, the Government does not have that. The multidisciplinary approach that we want to use to go out into the communities to educate the parents [and] to educate the teachers, basically we call them sensitisation awareness workshops," Brown-Earle stated."And of course we have very few schools with special education teachers, because a lot of our special education teachers have migrated. Others have gone to work in the private sector. You have psychologists who work with the Government and leave and open private practice, so you can imagine [that] only those parents who can afford to get the individualised training and attention are able to do so," she added.At the same time she noted that a number of the schools in rural Jamaica have already expressed interest in the programme."Many of the schools are very interested in having them be a part of their programme, working with the children. A couple of the small private schools say, 'Miss, can you come and train our teachers how to work with John Brown when he comes back to us,'" Brown-Earle said.