The Control Yuan yesterday asked the Ministry of Education to supervise local governments’ efforts to develop effective methods to help students with emotional and behavioral disorders, and diffuse tension between families and schools regarding the handling of incidents caused by such disorders.
A report by Control Yuan members Wang Yu-ling (王幼玲) and Yeh Yi-jin (葉宜津) found that students’ emotional and behavioral outbursts can be understood as calls for help, but are often misrepresented as acts of vandalism, causing students to suffer even greater emotional stress.
Out of the 92,638 elementary school, junior-high school and high-school students who were last year registered as having mental or physical disabilities, 6,979, or 7.53 percent, had been diagnosed with emotional and behavioral disorders, the report said.
Photo courtesy of the New Taipei City Education Bureau via CNA
They included 15,879, or 17.14 percent, who had autism, it said.
While there are established measures for intervention and administrative support, on-site counseling is more urgently needed than reports analyzing such incidents, the report said, adding that schools might need to assign assistants to students with such disorders.
The report said that schools have responded to incidents by giving the students involved demerits, asking parents of institutional representatives to supervise them during lessons or homeschool them, forcibly removing them from class, forcibly suppressing unwanted behavior, forcibly taking them to hospital, or calling the police or local fire department over an incident
None of those actions are advised in positive behavior support theories, and create an unhelpful high-pressure environment for students and parents, the report said.
Taipei is the only city or county in Taiwan that has an administrative support system that permanently employs professionals to help with such incidents, the report said, adding that Taipei’s system was founded in 2003 and features eight dedicated professionals.
The ministry should work with local governments to analyze what resources are needed to effectively resolve this issue, the report said.
The nation’s special-education teachers work 3.5 times more than special-education teachers in other countries and often take on duties outside their job descriptions, as Taiwan places too little emphasis on emotional support for students, the report said.
The ministry should look into the programs in place to foster professional emotional support talent, including training more behavior analysts and setting up a certification system for behavior analysts, the report said.
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