MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE

OF RUSSIAN FEDERATION


PRESS-SERVICE

         8.5 billion roubles is planned to be assigned from the federal budget in 2009-2012 for realization of the program of creating conditions for in-house training of disabled children and for distance education. The budget of 2009has already provided resources of 1 billion roubles, in the next three years it is planned to assign 2.5 billion roubles annually.

         The lessons will be conducted online when a teacher communicates with a child and children can communicate among themselves. "Our aim is to make the educational process open at most and effective and to let children communicate with their age-mates as much as possible and feel themselves full members of society," underlines the Director of the Department of the state policy in the sphere of education, additional education and child social protection of the Ministry of education and science of the Russian Federation Alina Levitskaya.

         To achieve this objective centers of distance education for disabled children who need in-house training will be created in all regions of the country. "Houses of disabled children who can not study at school will be provided with workplaces equipped with the complete set of the computer engineering, the educational equipment and the software connected to the Internet. The teachers, in their turn, will complete a course of special training and will be provided with necessary teaching and methodological materials, they will also have workplaces with access to the Internet," notes Alina Levitskaya.

         Alina Levitskaya stresses that each child will be provided with the necessary equipment individually, depending on his/her possibilities and needs: "For example in case a children suffer from the disorder of locomotive system and find difficulties in standard controlling a computer they will be provided with special devices, so that a small effort would be enough to control it, or it would be a head mouse. Visually impaired children will be provided with special program software including a speech synthesizer and a printer with Braille alphabet".




For reference:

The program of providing possibilities for in-house training and distance education of disabled children will be funded both by the federal budget and budgets of regions. Regions will receive from the federal budget means to provide workplaces for disabled children's learning and workplaces for teachers with necessary devices, than to connect these places to the Internet and to equip centers of distance education. Some part of the sum will be spent on training courses for teachers. Subjects of the Russian Federation will finance arrangement of work of distance education centers, teachers' salaries, and access to the Internet, technical services and other incidental costs.

The work on drawing up lists of disabled children in need of in-house training, including the form of distance education was conducted by educational authorities of the Russian Federation subjects. All children included in these lists will be taken to this form of education. The system of distance education and in-house training for children with disabilities was successfully tested in several regions, that allowed to start reforming the sphere of education of disabled children studying at home in 2009 within the new direction of the national project "Education" - "Distance learning of disabled children".