The Pattaya Deaf School

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The Pattaya Redemptorist School for Deaf Children was built under a grant of the Jules and Paul-Emile Leger Foundation of Canada. The schools goal is to teach sign language to less privileged pre-school children in order that they will qualify for entry into a government school for the deaf. In this regard, it is one of only a handful of such schools in all of Thailand.

Unlike other schools in the Pattaya Complex, the school for deaf children does not attempt primary or secondary education. The teaching staff are all fully qualified in special teaching methods for the deaf. Most of the children stay at the school for two years before entering the national primary school system.

The school has provided hearing aids to children who can benefit from such a device. Because of the limited resources however, it does not attempt to provide medical services for the correction of hearing problems. The cost of doing so for a single child would deprive as many as ten other children from receiving the benefits of the school. The school would like to provide computer speech training equipment to enable the deaf children to develop better speech and lip-reading ability. Again, however, the financial resources have not been available.

By receiving tuition free pre-schooling and the special care of deaf qualified instructors, these children benefit from a better quality of education throughout their school years. It is not a total solution to the problem for the obvious reasons:

  • The school cannot handle a large percentage of the deaf children requiring their services.
  • The deaf ,like other physically disabled in Thailand, face enormous problems of acceptance in society.
  • There are very limited job opportunities for the deaf in Thailand.
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toward the highway toward the orphanage