Khost school for deaf and dumb children lacks proper facilities

KHOST CITY (Pajhwok): Officials of a school for deaf and dumb in southeastern Khost province have asked the government to provide proper learning facilities for the special children.

The school has no building of its own and is being run at the building of Khost Technical Institute.

Hayatullah, a ninth class student of the school, used sign language to communicate with Pajhwok Afghan News: “I am interested in studying, but our school has no building, textbooks, tables, chairs, studying items and we face various more problems.”

He said: “We face many challenges and we have shared our problems with the officials many times, so far no practical steps were taken to solve them.”

Zeenatullah, another student told Pajhwok most of their school’s students were poor and came from faraway areas.

He said: “We have no carpets, no chairs, no tables, books and stationery. We are poor, we cannot afford buying anything and even we have no money to pay for transport fare.”

Noorza Ali, a teacher of the school, said they used sign language in the school. “We want the government to arrange some capacity building programs for us”.

Noorza Ali told Pajhwok: “We teach our students with very limited resources, the environment of the school is not good either and we want the government to arrange capacity building programs for the teachers.”

Technical and Professional Studies head Engineer Abidur Rahman confirmed the problems mentioned by the special school students and teachers, but said relevant government departments had promised to solve them.

He said: “The school for deaf and dumb children needs a building, professional teachers and dormitory. We have shared our problems with the officials several times and we hope they will be solved soon.”

The school for special children was established in 2011 and has about 200 male students right now.

aw/ma