The Landmark Project
In order to improve the
educational standards and practices of the schools for hearing-impaired the
Senzor Foundation started in 2000 a multi-year project entitled Landmark. The
initiator of this project is a professional teacher and social worker, who
successfully graduated from her university studies in spite of her hearing
disability. In the past years she had the opportunity to experience in her day
to day work as an educator of individual deaf children the enormous advantages
of personalized teaching methods
Unfortunately, her and her
students' case is a rather exceptional one. Due to the malfunctioning of
Romanian educational system, the great majority of deaf young people can not
hope even to enter an university, let alone to finish it. The special schools
for hearing-impaired children in Romania are provided with extremely small
budgetary funds, and therefore are able to apply modern teaching methods only
to a limited extent. The pupils studying in such schools experience huge disadvantages
which are only aggravating the negative consequences of their disability.
The beneficiaries of
this project will be children who are educationally and socially disadvantaged
due to their reduced hearing capacity. The project's aim is to attenuate
and overcome these disadvantages as much as possible:
- assist deaf children and youth
in dealing with their special educational problems and to provide them with
hearing aids and other special equipment
- help the integration of deaf
children into their own families and to prepare parents who have children with
hearing disabilities for their special educational roles