The Children's Bureau of the Ministry of the Interior has set aside NT$85 million to provide financial assistance to families with mentally disadvantaged children.
"The number of reported cases of potentially mentally disadvantaged children is about 13,000, which is approximately 5.03 percent of the population of pre-school children," said Huang Bi-hsia (黃碧霞), who is in charge of the bureau.
The budget is to assist parents with costs associated with early rehabilitation and commuting.
According to the Bureau, the 5.03 percent is still less than the 6 to 8 percent of children who are reported as mentally disadvantaged in highly developed countries.
"There might still be many unreported cases, and we urge authorities to report to the bureau so that these children can receive rehabilitative education during the prime learning stages," said Huang.
Huang also pointed out that according to statistics provided by the World Health Organization, every dollar that is put into early rehabilitation may later cut the cost of special education by three dollars.
"There are also experts who feel that rehabilitation done before the age of three is ten times more effective than after the age of three," Huang said.
Huang explained that due to the low rate of reported cases -- and due to a lack of parental understanding of the issue and a shortage of professional personnel in the field -- the nation's promotion of early rehabilitation for mentally disadvantaged children is still lagging behind that of many developed countries.
"However, in recent years, there have been more solid methods being developed to put early rehabilitation into practice," Huang said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift