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There are two basic types of Residential units
- Traditional Boarding School: This has been available for over a century, primarily to blind and deaf children. Its prime purpose is to provide special education services that are qualitatively or quantitatively superior to those available in local communities.
- Traditional type-Unit: Serving primarily the mentally retarded and socially maladjusted.
Its aim is to provide:
- For the protection of society.
- For corrective treatment of a non-educational nature
- For the care of the child
Drawbacks
- Boarding schools have also come under vigorous attack in recent year, primarily because they are the least effective plan for normalizing education and other services for children in need of special help.
- Children and parents are separated for much of the school years.
- They tend to be most expensive of special education services.
- Placement in such a setting may deprive an exceptional child of living with and learning from the normal children.
- These schools have traditionally not been available to preschool children or to school age children without self-care skills, including of course, the multiply handicapped.
To reduce all these drawbacks
- To counter these charges, boarding schools are enrolling increasingly both day and residential students.
- Boarding pupils are encouraged to return home for weekends and for the conventional vocation periods and festival times.
- Encourage campus visits by parents and arrange for fragment correspondence or telephone conversions between the family and the child.
- Boarding school students often participate in recreational, church and other activities in the community.
- More resident children than in the past are going to neighborhood public day school for at least part of their instructor/education.
These ways, efforts are made to keep the pupils in the community as much as possible.
Advantages:
- They provide a more comprehensive education.
- Instead of a school programme for six hours per day, five days a week, there can be a twenty four hour day; seven days a week and the school year can be extended when necessary.
- Boarding schools are large enough to provide a comprehensive array of educational, vocational and recreational services.
- They continue to provide about the only feasible public special educator for some rural isolated Children.
- Boarding schools can mobilize specialized, comprehensive diagnostic and counseling services which would be difficult for only small community to provide. Boarding school has more diagnostic community services.
- Because of the large enrollments of pupils with a specific type of disability, they are able to provide a richer variety of special-subject teachers especially the upper grades.
- Lip reading & finger spelling is learnt better and they speak if the child is in a boarding school.
Like day schools, boarding schools are going through a period of transition.
- As more and more children with mild, moderate and single learning disabilities are being kept at home and integrated into general education as much as possible.
- The Boarding schools are being called upon to serve a greater number of multiply handicapped children. Here more intensive and comprehensive services can be provided for such children.
- Great care needs to be taken to prevent boarding schools from becoming a heaven for neglected , battered abandoned and orphaned children.In such cases boarding homes with foster parents in cities, with day school programmes are often a better solution.
- Furthermore, pupil placement in such facilities should not be for the convenience of parents.
- The reason for placing a child in a boarding school should be because he can make greater progress in such setting than in any other.
Special school:
A special school is a school catering for students who have special educational needs due to severe learning difficulties, physical disabilities or behavioral problems. Special schools may be specifically designed, staffed and resourced to provide the appropriate special education for children with additional needs. Students attending special schools generally do not attend any classes in mainstream schools.
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