BARBADIANS WITH SPECIAL needs will have access to a state of the art educational facility within another two years.
The multimillion-dollar Derrick Smith School and Vocational Centre at Lears, St Michael, is an initiative of Derrick and Gay Smith who are the benefactors.
It will cater to children over the age of 11 as well as adults.
Construction began in July on the 60 000 square foot facility that sits on four and a half acres of land, part of which was donated by Sir Charles Williams.
Speaking prior to a tour of the facility yesterday by education officials, Derrick Smith said it was hoped that the school would open and begin teaching children by September 2015 while the adults would be settled in the vocational centre “sometime before then”.
Smith said he was inspired to donate to the project by his 12-year-old grandson Ryan who suffered from acute encephalitis ten years ago and was left with permanent brain damage.
He noted that Ryan had benefited from special schools and facilities in England and Australia, attesting to the difference that state of the art facilities catering to children with special needs could make.
Smith is grand patron and trustee of the Sandy Lane Charitable Trust which sponsors the Sunshine Early Stimulation Centre. This caters to children with special needs from age one to 11.
Citing the need for training after this age, Smith said the trust had committed to building the facility and maintaining it on an annual basis while Government had agreed to fund the daily operating costs.
He noted that the whole project was being constructed and supplied by local companies.
“It has been designed by Kevin Brown, a young, talented Barbadian architect. It is being built by a local contractor with a local labour force and with all the materials supplied by Barbadian companies,” he said.
Trustee of the Sandy Lane Charitable Trust, Phillipa Challis, stressed the importance of a well-organized training programme to prepare individuals with special needs for the world of work and life in general.
She said learners from age 11 to 16 would receive lessons in functional mathematics and language arts as well as living skills such as social behaviour, doing laundry and making a bed.
The aim is to equip them with the skills to live as independently as possible.
Young adults will be enrolled in one of four training areas – woodwork, sewing and craft, agriculture and landscaping and hospitality and home economics.
“At the entrance to the facility there will be a large retail outlet – a department which provides practical training in a wide variety of retail work in a vocational setting from deliveries, merchandising and display to money handling and customer service,” Challis added.
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