‘Special education teachers shun schools for home lessons’

The Executive Director of M.D School, Lagos, Omolara Adedugbe, has lamented that special education teachers are increasingly shunning schools for private home lessons because of the higher earnings they make from teaching children with special needs individually.

Adedugbe said the development had made it difficult for schools to recruit and retain qualified teachers to cater for neurodivergent children, thereby limiting efforts to provide inclusive education.

She spoke at an event to mark the 40th anniversary of M.D School, Lagos, which was established as an inclusive educational institution in 1986.

She decried the challenges of sustaining special education in Nigeria.

She said, “Getting teachers for neurodivergent children is a very serious challenge in this country because they are not there.

“The few available are ripping parents off. They don’t want to come and work in schools. They want to be special teachers who go into houses and charge per hour. It pays them.

“It is a big challenge, and that is why I have had to start scaling down gradually because of the resources.”

Adedugbe, who described M.D School as the first privately owned inclusive mainstream school in Lagos State, also recounted that the institution initially encountered resistance from parents who were uncomfortable enrolling their children alongside pupils with special needs.

She explained that the stigma forced the school to abandon its integrated arrangement in 1988 and operate its regular and special-needs sections at separate locations.

She added that the school later adopted the name M.D School (Inclusive) to reduce the stigma associated with its earlier designation as a special-needs institution.

She said, “When we started, the first challenge was the fact that a lot of parents whose children didn’t have special needs found it very difficult to enrol their regular children.

“The school became stigmatised, so much so that in 1988, we had to separate, against what we set out to do.

“We had to separate because we were not moving forward, and we were spending our own money,” she said.

She said the ratio of special-needs pupils to regular pupils at the school was now approximately one to 50, a situation she attributed partly to the loss of facilities previously provided through her late husband’s clinical practice.

Her husband, Bamidele Adedugbe, died 10 years after the establishment of the school.

“The ratio of special to regular students is now about 1:50. We had facilities to house them when my husband was alive. In his clinic, he had a very big space, which we used for children who came from Kano, Abuja and Port Harcourt.

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“But when he was no more, and the place was no longer available, there was nowhere I could be paying another rent to house them,” she said.

The school head recalled that establishing the institution was financially demanding, disclosing that her late husband, Bamidele Adedugbe, used his laboratory equipment as collateral to secure a N120,000 loan from Universal Trust Bank.

Adedugbe said the death of her husband, a clinical audiologist who provided specialist support for the children, 10 years after the school was founded, further made sustaining its special-needs education programme challenging.

Despite the challenges, Adedugbe expressed satisfaction that the school’s pioneering efforts had encouraged the emergence of other institutions providing education for children with special needs.

Adedugbe urged the government, parents and non-governmental organisations to collaborate in supporting neurodivergent children, stressing that developmental differences should not be treated as a curse or a source of stigma.

“You never know who would become a neurodivergent child. If, as a mother, you escaped it, you might not escape it as a grandparent. It could be in a family; it is not a curse, it happens.

“So, every stakeholder in society, whether government or parent, even non-governmental organisations, should collaborate and come together to help neurodivergent children,” she said.

The event was chaired by a former Attorney General of the Federation, Akin Olujinmi, who commended the school for its resilience and commitment to its founding vision.

Olujinmi praised Adedugbe for sustaining the institution despite financial and regulatory challenges, noting that the founders had to overcome considerable obstacles to translate their vision into reality.

“Dreams don’t work except the dreamers walk the dreams. Mrs Adedugbe beat the odds, especially in finance. Regulatory procedures can also turn a vision into a nightmare. You need resilience to see through the dream. She got people to execute the vision of the founder,” he said.

The Director-General, Office of Education Quality Assurance, Dr Sulaimon Ogunmuyiwa, also commended the school for its commitment to character building and providing quality education to children in Lagos State.

He urged the management to remain committed to maintaining educational standards.

The Chairman of the school’s Governing Council, Prof Adesola Adeosun, said the institution remained committed to its founding vision of nurturing individuals to achieve their full potential through optimism, dedication and hard work.

In his sermon, Rev Tony Akinyemi described the school’s 40-year journey as evidence of God’s grace, diligence and hard work.

The event featured dance, drama, renditions, and recitations by the current pupils, with alumni of the school also joining some of the presentations.