http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Move+surprises+disabled+kids+schools/516
9522/story.html
Move surprises disabled kids' schools
By Brenda Branswell, THE GAZETTE July 28, 2011 8:02 AM
0
•Story
•Photos ( 1 )
Cristóbal Vignal, chairperson of the Mackay Centre School’s governing board,
with his daughter Margot, 13, who has cerebral palsy, moved to Montreal to
be closer to the facility.
Photograph by: John Kenney, THE GAZETTE
MONTREAL - For decades, the MAB-Mackay Rehabilitation Centre has housed two
schools for disabled students: the Mackay Centre School and the Philip E.
Layton School.
Students at the specialized schools now face being uprooted.
Parents were stunned to learn at the end of the school year that the schools
will be moved into an English Montreal School Board facility “by as early as
August 2013.”
“We were just extremely concerned and surprised because nobody expected it –
absolutely nobody expected it,” said Cristóbal Vignal, chairperson of the
governing board at the Mackay Centre School.
Vignal, who attended a meeting with other parents in June, said school board
officials also seemed surprised by the decision.
The schools in Notre Dame de Grâce are part of the EMSB. The Mackay Centre
School for deaf and disabled students is based at the Mackay Rehabilitation
Centre on Décarie Blvd. The Philip E. Layton School for visually impaired
students is at the Montreal Association for the Blind, adjacent to Concordia
University’s Loyola campus. The MAB and Mackay centre merged in 2006.
Senior officials at the MAB-Mackay Rehabilitation Centre and the EMSB could
not be reached for comment.
However, in a joint statement with the school board, the rehab centre said
it has unveiled a plan to consolidate its operations at one site, with the
schools moving into an EMSB facility.
Christine Boyle, executive director of the MAB-Mackay Rehabilitation Centre,
said the move is consistent with the centre’s strategic plan, which calls
for consolidating its clinical services at one site.
“This will allow us to focus on our core expertise and is key to our
becoming a centre of excellence in the area of physical rehabilitation,”
Boyle said in the statement.
“It is our belief that the relocation is in the best interest of students
and their families,” Boyle and Robert Stocker, the EMSB’s director-general,
told parents in a letter last month.
“Rehabilitation services will continue to be provided by MAB-Mackay
Rehabilitation Centre Staff and the (EMSB) will continue to offer
educational services within the means available to both organizations.
“Our dedicated team will be in place and on site to ensure that your child
will continue to receive both educational and rehabilitation services in a
newly adapted school.”
The letter said both sides would soon be in a position to pinpoint EMSB
facilities that “could possibly house these important programs.”
Choosing a new site for the two schools will launch “a long process”
involving feedback from all stakeholders, they said.
Vignal said Boyle told parents at the meeting that the MAB-Mackay Centre was
looking at selling one or both of its facilities.
Parents are extremely attached to the Mackay Centre facility, Vignal told
The Gazette. “It’s just over the years become an ideal facility.”
Toby Benlolo, outgoing governing board chairperson of the Philip E. Layton
School, said the feedback she has received from parents is that “in general,
it’s not bad that it’s moving because it will be to a safer environment.”
The facility is about 100 years old, she said.
“But the problem is will they be able to ensure at least the minimum of what
they’re receiving now as services in this new environment,” Benlolo said.
When she wrote the MAB-Mackay Centre’s board last month about the planned
move, Benlolo said for decisions of this magnitude, “I would have thought
that parents and staff would have been given the courtesy to be heard,
before the final decision was rendered.”
The MAB-Mackay’s strategic plan for 2010 to 2015 calls for developing a new
partnership with the EMSB. One of the points listed is to obtain an
agreement with the EMSB “whereby the school board assumes full
responsibility for all school related activities and costs.”
“It appears from explanations that were given to us that the school is
actually costing the rehab centre quite a bit of money every year because
the education ministry is not paying up its due,” Vignal said. The Education
Department could not be reached for comment.
Parents created a stakeholders committee and sent a letter to Education
Minister Line Beauchamp this month, spelling out the students’ needs in a
new school. They’ve asked that it be centrally located on Montreal Island.
Vignal and his family moved to Montreal from Laval several years ago to be
closer to the Mackay Centre. He said he is very satisfied with the services
that his daughter, who has cerebral palsy, receives at the school, including
ergotherapy for fine motor skills.
The services children receive there include “seating” to be fitted for
wheelchairs and bicycles, speech therapy, physiotherapy and audiology,
Vignal said. Parents are being assured all of that will be provided in a new
facility, he said.
Parents are trying to be positive and to work with the rehab centre and the
government. They are cautiously optimistic that “we will manage to do
something even better than the Mackay Centre,” Vignal said.
“We’re ready to fight for our children to make sure that they get the best,”
he said.
“Right now we’re fully cooperative, helpful and available but … we are not
going to accept that our kids be taken backwards. We want this to be a
forward jump.”
[log in to unmask]
Read more:
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Move+surprises+disabled+kids+schools/516
9522/story.html#ixzz1TPNRRTR7
-----------------------
To change your mail settings or leave the C-PALSY list, go here:
http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?SUBED1=c-palsy
|
