Bhutan Officials Visit PNW BOCES to Study Special Education

Officials from Bhutan’s Ministry of Education travelled halfway around the world recently to visit the Walden and Pines Bridge schools at Putnam/Northern Westchester BOCES to see how special education is provided here.

“We are here to see how to take special education forward in our nation,” said Sonam Phuntsho, principal of the Changangkha Middle Secondary School in Thimphu, which has 1,200 students including 48 students with special needs. 

The Bhutan delegation included the Director of Special Education in the Ministry of Education, the principals of two large schools in Bhutan, the chief program officer for special education and two representatives of the Bhutan Foundation. In addition to the Walden and Pines Bridge schools, the Bhutanese officials visited Rockland BOCES, the Blythedale Children’s Hospital and School, Westchester ARC, Mamaroneck Schools and Democracy Prep, a charter school in Harlem.

“We wanted to expose our visitors to a wide range of offerings for children with special needs and allow them to have meaningful discussions with special educators here,” said Laurie Levine, the regional special education trainer for the Lower Hudson Valley who helped organize the trip.

A member of the American Special Education Advisory Committee, Levine has been volunteering in Bhutan each summer since 2009 as a consultant for the Bhutan Foundation, which was founded by Alix and Reudi Laager of Larchmont. The committee’s mission: to build a special education system for an entire nation from the ground up.

When they began, Levine said, the only special education services available in Bhutan were two schools: one for the blind and one for the deaf. There were no services for children with other learning disabilities like attention deficit disorder, emotional disorders or more severe and complex disabilities. Children with issues like ADD were simply left to muddle through on their own in classes with 40 to 50 students, while students with severe disabilities were kept at home by their parents.

A great deal of progress has been made since the American educators first travelled to Bhutan in 2009 to train teachers, set up resource centers and create pilot schools. More children with special needs are being taught in schools now, rather than kept at home. Several pilot programs have been launched to provide special education to children. Teachers are learning to use different instructional methods to meet the needs of different types of learners. And private vocational schools have sprung up and are helping children with special needs to transition from school to life in the community.

However, this small country tucked away in the Himalayan Mountains of Southeast Asia has particular challenges. The nation, which is roughly half the size of New York State, is very mountainous, making travel from one area to another difficult. Although there are a few classes related to special education at colleges in Bhutan, no college there offers a bachelor’s degree in special education and there are only a few speech, physical or occupational therapists in the entire country. In the whole nation of about 700,000 people, Levine said there are about three or four people with special education degrees that they earned in India or Australia.

“It is great to see the whole continuum of services being provided to children here. It has been an eye-opener for us,” said Tshering Yangzom, program officer for the Bhutan Foundation in Washington. “Our country drew up a special education policy with goals and objectives that are visionary. But we are lacking human resources as well as materials. This level of service is what we strive for but it will be very difficult.”