Comprehensive School Dortmund Scharnhorst (Germany)

The positive initiative of the school is, that handicapped children are taught here, too. This special project began in the year 1991/92. Our school is the first school were that happened, so the teachers at first didn’t know, how they should behave.

The beginning of this experiment started in some of Dortmund’s elementary schools. They teach children from the first to the fourth grade. After that grade they go to a school for educationally difficult children. But it wasn’t so successful, because they were accustomed to learning with non-handicapped children.

At that point the parents of the handicapped children had some talks with the teachers. Later, before the summer-holidays 1991 many questions were asked by the staff. Questions like isn’t that asking too much from the teachers , how the pupils would react, and whether the school was prepared to cope with these problems? In the discussion it became clear that the school needed structural changes, they as well as the teachers needed special training, and they needed help from people, who know how they handicapped children should be taught.

In 1994 there were four handicapped children, today there are eleven. All person involved were sure, that this experiment would bring profit to all of the participated people. The handicapped children are happy, because they can be taught with "normal" children, too. They would be treated like not handicapped pupils. The handicapped and the non-handicapped children like each other. The start to learn in the comprehensive-school was not so easy for the handicapped children, because they sometimes got called names by the "normal" children. But the "normal" children later realised, that it was not so good, and so they stopped doing that. The handicapped children get more care than the others, so the others felt ignored.