Welcome to the Special Needs ~ Special Kids Disability Awareness page! This site is dedicated to all the children, adolescents and adults I have worked with in the past - in the present - and those I will meet in the future! I also dedicate this page to their families - those that give them the support and guidance they need to live their life to the fullest, "disabled" or not!
I am not a parent of a child with special needs (or a parent at all for that matter *grin*), but I am a friend. My background in special needs includes working as a one-on-one mediator, working as a group home counsellor, and educating the special learner.
There are several reasons for creating this page. These include my desire to:
- Share my passion and to help those who are "afraid" and want more information; to "right the wrongs" by providing common myths and facts.
- Promote the awareness of "disability", by providing information on specific disabilities.
- Knock down all the negative connotations that have surrounded disability for so long by promoting positive language when referring to people who have special needs (as compiled by the Active Living Alliance For Canadians With A Disability). Through our use of words we can either reinforce negative stereotypes, or we can make a positive contribution toward breaking down barriers. I'd like to knock down as many barriers as I can!
- To make people aware that labelling a person sets him/her apart as "different from the mainstream", and somehow not "normal". When a label is used to describe a person, what is perceived is often not the individual, but the characteristic described by the label. For example, by referring to a group of people as "the blind" or "the deaf", or to an individual as "an epileptic" or "a C.P.", we do not recognize the person as a whole. Instead, we focus on the differences and describe the person in terms of a condition.
- Provide a safe place to vent, communicate, ask questions, and learn about special needs through the use of our message board.
- Provide support for anyone and everyone who needs it through the use of poems, words of wisdom from parents, articles and more!
- To bring support workers together with our Mediators Mailing List and Mediators Chat Group
- And mainly, to remind people that all kids are special regardless of special need!
Hopefully through this knowledge ignorance will be conquered and my dream of people seeing the individuals, before the "disability" will come true. After all, people are PEOPLE first! Help make my dream come true, promote disability awareness!!!
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