Holness, Golding promise focus on special-needs children, disability support

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness on Sunday acknowledged the challenges being faced by children with special needs and their families, promising to expand the existing facilities that cater to them if given a third term.

His announcement comes weeks after national discourse about the learning challenges some students and schools face, and a lack of facilities and specialists to address these issues.

“We see a lot of children with severe learning challenges, including from autism and other spectrum disorders, and the parents simply just don’t know how to cope. We don’t have enough of those services in Jamaica,” said Holness, moments before announcing that Jamaicans will go to the polls on September 3.

“So, what we’re going to do in our next term, we’re going to invest in expanding the existing facilities that we have particularly at Mico [Care Centre], and we’re going to build new facilities to ensure that, eventually, we have one such facility in every parish in the island to treat with those persons and households who are suffering,” the prime minister said.

A Sunday Gleaner report on June 1 revealed that hundreds of special-needs children faced silent struggles while being out of school awaiting assessments. Families lamented the country’s inability to meet the educational needs of children with special needs.

Data obtained from the Ministry of Education showed that approximately 6,800 students with diagnosed special education needs are currently enrolled in the education system – 5,989 in public institutions and 811 in private ones.

Each year, nearly 1,000 children are registered for psychoeducational assessment at The Mico University College Child Assessment and Research in Education (CARE) Centre – the oldest institution of its kind in the country. However, only about 700 are assessed annually, leaving around 300 children on a growing waitlist. Wait times for assessment are more than a year.

LITERACY CRISIS

Days later, The Gleaner reported on a literacy crisis facing Pembroke Hall High School, where more than 70 per cent of the roughly 220 students entered grade seven being unable to read, or did so only at a grade-three level. Some were also unable to identify letters of the alphabet.

“Many of these lives can be made meaningful. They can contribute, but they need the right facilities, they need the right therapy, and they need the right care; and our Government cares and will provide the right services and facilities,” Holness said on Sunday.

During his 2025-2026 contribution to the Budget Debate in March, Opposition Leader Mark Golding proposed to establish a National Disability Fund should his party form the next Government.

He has equally promised to increase spending to address the challenges of special-needs children in Jamaica.

He said specific allocations would come from the Consolidated Fund.

Golding said while the World Health Organization estimates that approximately 16 per cent (or 448,000) of Jamaica’s population has some form of disability, less than one per cent of the annual Budget goes to addressing the needs of this community.

He said then that much more needed to be done to empower persons with disabilities to be fully included in all aspects of national life. Similarly, he argued that funding to support children with special needs is “woefully inadequate”.

INCLUSIVE SOCIETY A MUST

“With my family background, I am committed to making this happen. We must always remember that disability respects no one, so we must create a society that is fully inclusive of all our citizens, mindful that any of us can become disabled at any time,” said Golding, whose father, Professor John Golding, pioneered Jamaica’s only fully integrated rehabilitation centre in response to the polio epidemic in the 1950s.

Jamaica’s most recent census data (2011) records disability prevalence of 3.3 per cent, compared with 6.3 per cent and 4.8 per cent in 2001 and 1991 for the population five years and older. The latest (2007) available disability prevalence data for children two to nine years old as high as 15 per cent, according to a 2020 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization report which looked at disability and education in Jamaica.

The Jamaica Council for Persons with Disabilities has approximately 17,000 persons registered in its database.

kimone.francis@gleanerjm.com