Launch of the DARE TO FIGHT FOR YOUR CHILD Project

Project Launch

‘’Dignity, Access, Respect, Education for Children with Disabilities’’

Bucharest, November 6t^h , 2014, The European Center for the Rights of Children with Disabilities (ECRCD) is starting today the implementation of the project ‘’Dignity, Access, Respect, Education for Children with Disabilities – D.A.R.E. for Children with Disabilities’’, a project funded by the Foundation for an Open Society – Initiative for Human Rights.

The aim of the project is to facilitate the non-discriminatory access of children with disabilities to qualitative education. The parents’ voices regarding the quality of their children education in special schools can now be heard.  

Thus, we set the goal that though the above mentioned project to analyze the underway of the educational process in a special school and thereby to be able to offer the parents of children with disabilities an efficient instrument for the evaluation of the special schools in which their children are enrolled.

More than that, we will organize 5 regional meetings with parents of children with disabilities, during which we will provide relevant information about the right to education of their children, the methods of recognizing and reclamation of discriminatory situations, as well as the methods of evaluation of the quality of their children’s education in the special schools.

In equal measure, we will try to meet the needs of the parents of children with disabilities by piloting an online platform through which the parents will be able to submit relevant information based on a questionnaire about the degree of satisfaction with the special schools in which their children study. The online questionnaire will be accessible on a national level by all parents in order to contribute to the transparency of the system for special education.

At the same time, the parents will benefit from the support and judicial counseling of CEDCD during the project’s implementation in relation to their children’s right to education.

The project D.A.R.E. for Children with Disabilities will be ongoing for a period of 12 months.

‘’This project offers the parents, for the first time, the opportunity to develop a participatory attitude to the educational process of their children and to make heard their voices as beneficiaries of the special educational system. At the same time, the parents’ contribution on the monitoring and evaluation of the educational process constitute a launching model for the transparency of the system for special education. We want educational services focused on the needs of children with disabilities, we want quality, transparency and a direct implication of the parents in order to establish objectives from the ‘’Plan for Personalized Intervention’’, declared Mădălina TURZA, the president of CEDCD.

The research’s results, as well as the parents’ contributions will be presented at the end of the project within the meeting with the representatives of decisional factors on the theme.

Background information:

Romania has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities in 2010, with law 221/2010.

According to the official statistical data, in Romania live about 70.647[1] registered children with disabilities, but the real number of the children with special needs is exceeding this number, because it represents only the number of children for which their parents or legal representatives have underwent complex steps in order to register and obtain the handicap certificates. From the total number of 70.647 of registered children with disabilities, 11.904 are schooled in special schools, 23.773 are attending regular schools and 4.038 – other forms of education[2].  Summarizing the official data we can observe the fact that approximately 31.000 of the children with disabilities are unschooled.

Email: madalina.turza@cedcd.ro/old

Mob: +40737545955

www.cedcd.ro/old

[1] National Authority for Child Protection -http://www.copii.ro/alte_categorii.html

[2] National Authority for Child Protection  -http://www.copii.ro/alte_categorii.html