‘Give deaf students a fair chance’: After finding success in US, deaf Jamaican calls for change at home

Deaf students who have the academic ability and desire to enrol in the regular school system in Jamaica must be provided with qualified interpreters in the classroom to enable them to function and excel. That call is coming from 40-year-old Kaniel McDonald Dodd, who attended Mona High School in 1998 as part of a Government programme aimed at incorporating special needs students with exceptionalities into the regular school system. She was the third deaf student to attend Mona High at the time, but the first to enter the institution at Grade seven through the Common Entrance examination.

The other two students were educated up to Grade 10 at the Lister Mair Gilby School for the Deaf before joining Grade 11 students at Mona to prepare for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations. The programme of integrating special needs students into the regular school system was lauded by then education minister Burchell Whiteman as useful in teaching both groups of students to live with each other. Kaniel McDonald Dodd Although she spent only one year at the institution before migrating to the United States in 1999, McDonald Dodd told Observer Online that integrating into the regular school system was challenging, as she was the only deaf student in her class and did not have an interpreter.

“It was kind of a challenge for me because I was the only deaf student in a hearing class, but my mother used to sit next to me and help me in the evenings. She would have a cassette and do recordings, and she would copy what the teacher said, write it down, and give it to me. So that kind of support I had at home,” she said.

McDonald Dodd said while some teachers and classmates made efforts to assist her, the absence of a dedicated interpreter meant that much of the responsibility for helping her understand the lessons fell on her mother. I did not see some things exactly, but I tried to read lips. I tried to communicate with my classmates by writing.

Some of them helped me, and I tried to follow a list and instructions that the teacher gave me,” she added. Academically, McDonald Dodd said the language barrier was another challenge, as sign language was her first language and she was still developing her English. “By the middle of the term, I failed English,” she recalled, adding that her mother subsequently sought additional support fr…