Just like elsewhere in the world, Romania has seen an increase in the number of children diagnosed with mental and developmental disorders.
Just like elsewhere in the world, Romania has seen an increase in the number of children diagnosed with mental and developmental disorders such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, known as ADHD. However, this is rather an empirical statement, because there are no conclusive or recent statistics on this. In 2012, there were 7,179 people registered as being diagnosed with autism according to statistics provided by the Health Ministry, but specialists say that the real number is much higher. In September 2015, the Save the Children non-governmental organisation estimated, based on data from the World Health Organisation, that out of approximately 3.8 million Romanian children, 760,000 suffered from a mental disorder, of which 13% of anxiety and 5% of ADHD. Also, one in 500 children were diagnosed with a form of autism and pervasive developmental disorders.
However, even more difficult than drawing up real statistics is the daily life of such children and their families, in particular the inclusion of the former into the school system. The education law has provisions granting support and ensuring the integration of these children, who are referred to as children with special educational needs. There are also pieces of secondary legislation establishing the forms and types of support services. They benefit those children who, following an assessment, received a school and professional guidance certificate issued by an educational resource and support centre. On the basis of this certificate, children with special educational needs can enrol into any public school, where they should benefit from psychological counselling and also have a support teacher to help them integrate and acquire the necessary skills. As usual, everything looks better on paper than in reality. Robert Florea, a coordinator with the Educational Resource and Support Centre in Bucharest told us:
"Unfortunately, at least in Bucharest, support teachers are scarce. They can only spend one or two hours a week with each child. For instance, such a teacher has 4 to 6 hours a month allocated for a child that has a certificate attesting the fact that he or she has special educational needs. From our point of view, this is insufficient. The support granted to these children and the educational methods they benefit from could certainly be improved."
Unfortunately, the administrative and staff issues are not as big as those triggered by the very groups of children that children with autism or ADHD are supposed to integrate into. Maria Teodorescu is a teacher and counsellor at a middle school in Bucharest and supports the inclusion into regular classes of the children with special educational needs. Maria Teodorescu:
"The psychological and pedagogical component should be better developed for these children to benefit from proper treatment. But what is needed most is for parents to better understand that at some point their children are children with special needs. A necessary thing is the efficient cooperation between the support teacher, the school counsellor, the elementary or secondary school teacher and parents. For these children to be accepted by their classmates, teachers should organise activities that should show the other pupils what tolerance means, because some of them do not know the significance of this word."
Apart from learning about tolerance, children and parents alike should find out about the behavioural disorders caused by ADHD. Anemari Necşulescu, who has a boy diagnosed with ADHD, shares her experience:
"Children with behavioural disorders need attention, as they find it difficult to concentrate and focus for a long period of time. This is why they disturb the class, for example. They speak without being asked and don't wait for their turn, they become agitated and disturb their colleagues. A teacher alone in the classroom with 29 pupils or more cannot handle the situation. Integration should be tackled from the perspective of parents of normal children, who do not know anything about these disorders and who, in most cases, are afraid of what they don't know. And this leads to rejection and stigma."
When mutual understanding fails, the situation can become extremely tense, especially when, against the background of marginalisation and increasing frustration, a child with ADHD can become violent. This autumn, at a secondary school in Ploieşti, the parents of most of the pupils protested against keeping in school a child who had been diagnosed with ADHD and who they say had a violent behaviour. This reaction is not unfamiliar to Anemari Necşulescu:
"I have had to deal with a primary school teacher who was not prepared to handle the temperament and the medical issue of our son, who, at the time, had not yet been diagnosed with ADHD. We did not know that our son suffered from ADHD, all we knew is that the teacher kept calling us to school to complain about the problems created by our son. He was not violent, he only disturbed the class. The teacher complained about these problems in front of the other parents, many of whom became very aggressive, called our son 'handicapped' and asked us to take him away from that school. We were open to have our son assessed by the school counsellor. We submitted an application and had the child assessed because we were looking for solutions. We moved the child to another school where we had the support of the director, because we wanted our son's right to education, as stipulated in Romania's Constitution, to be observed. We also hired a therapist for our boy. We agreed with his new teacher to give him tasks whenever she noticed that his frustration was piling up: to clean the blackboard, to dump the garbage can or to do small errands. These tasks make him loosen up, relax and he returns ready to pay attention to the class."
Following mediation between parents and school representatives, the situation at the school in Ploieşti calmed down and the pupil who disturbed the class is now back in school. Also the integration of Anemari Necşulescu's son is working well for the time being.
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