Residents with disabilities in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands face barriers to fully participating in the education system. In this edition of the podcast taken from a Northeast ADA webinar, Joe Zesski is joined by Mildred Gomez, Archie Jennings, and Nellyber Correa to discuss what challenges exist as well as the state of educational access in the territories for people with disabilities.
Residents with disabilities in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands face barriers to fully participating in the education system. In this edition of the podcast taken from a Northeast ADA webinar, Joe Zesski is joined by Mildred Gomez, Archie Jennings, and Nellyber Correa to discuss what challenges exist as well as the state of educational access in the territories for people with disabilities.
JOE ZESKI: Hello, welcome to Ask About the ADA, the podcast where we answer your questions about the Americans with Disabilities Act and how it applies to your everyday life.
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I'm Joe Zeski, the program manager here at the Northeast ADA Center. And on this week's edition of Ask About the ADA, we're going to focus on issues in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. In March 2022, we hosted a webinar that featured our affiliates that serve the US territories. The Northeast ADA has an affiliate in Puerto Rico, MAVI, which is the local center for independent living.
And joining us on the webinar from MAVI were two guests, Mildred Gomez and Nellyber Correa. We also were joined by our affiliate in the Virgin Islands, the Disability Rights Center of the Virgin Islands. From that organization, we were joined by Archie Jennings, who is the lead attorney for DRCVI. On this week's episode, we are going to focus in on our conversation about education in those territories.
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Let's transition to talking about education. What are the support structures like for students with disabilities, both K through 12, as well as in the college setting. And are you seeing any challenges that come up again and again? And I think for this question, Mildred, let's begin with you and the perspective from Puerto Rico on this one.
MILDRED GOMEZ: Sure. As I mentioned before, education is one of the areas that is being affected because COVID-19-- because many people don't have access to education because of technology or internet or other issues. But we have seen that through these two years that we've been under the pandemic, many students with special needs, people with disabilities, students with disabilities-- at the end, they have the technology. They have the computer. They can access the classes.
All people with disabilities are different, and all the students are different. We don't learn the same way and that's why we have reasonable accommodations at school. And we have seen, in my experience, that many people, many students-- they said, I think that I have not learned a lot during this year because I'm used to the school. I have a schedule established.
These students learn better when they are one-to-one, when the teachers are there. Many students are not able to be focused on a computer for one or two hours. And they are not able to sit down for 30 minutes. So this for sure affects their learning and the progress in the educational area.
And also, other situations about services, like you mentioned before, Joe, speech therapy, physical therapy, psychological therapy, occupational therapy-- most of these therapists have to be one-to-one. And you need equipment to give the therapy. During these two years, we have many students that-- because of the regulations and the lockdown, they are not able to receive these services that are very important for them to be focused and learn.
And the students with very particular special needs-- even though they are able to go back to school, parents need to take care of them. Because of their situations in the health area, they are not able to go back to schools since everything is OK or back to normal. And it's not the same-- having virtual classes or presential classes.
And in our experience, most of us can say, you know, I need to go back to the normality. Or I don't like more Zoom trainings or classes. And this is something that we have to look at and see how-- the government needs to see how this is going to change, and how it's going to be the new rules and procedures, because, for sure, the students with disabilities are the more affected in the educational area since the pandemic.
JOE ZESKI: And, Archie, what are you seeing in the Virgin Islands?
ARCHIE JENNINGS: Yes, as Mildred was saying, it's a very difficult situation, especially for those who needed related services-- occupational therapy, speech therapy, ASL assistance for the deaf and hard of hearing. Actually, the Department of Education had these special children covered with IEPs return to school before the regular school classes started.
But we still have-- there's going to be a bulge, meaning that there are a lot of compensatory education services that are owed to the children. And we're trying to gear up in addressing those complaints. We had some parents who were very vocal and advocated from probably the end of '20 through '21.
The Department of Education tried to be of assistance-- both St. Thomas District and St. Croix School District. But there's still a lot of students who did not receive certain services that would fulfill the IEPs that were in place at the beginning of 2020. Virtual learning-- the department here did try to get all students equipment, being computers-- and they got iPads.
Some were blocked because of not having access to the internet. And sometimes, I can't even get access to the internet where I live because of the hills-- the mountainside. So there's all those issues that some have no choice but to get to a location where they have access to the internet because of the geographical terrain of the islands.
But all in all, I just see a bulge of a lot of complaints. We're trying to get parents organized to address them in a manner with the department. And this is an election year. So they'll probably get a lot of attention as we go into this year-- that they will step up their efforts to make sure everybody is covered.
JOE ZESKI: That's a good point. Nellyber, did you want to add anything?
NELLYBER CORREA: I just want to add that we have a lot of emergency situations-- not just in Puerto Rico, just, really, islands face the same situation. But when the pandemic got to Puerto Rico, we faced before the earthquake at south. So our population had this economic situation after the earthquakes. When we got locked down and the schools start being virtual, some people don't have the access to the technology, or they don't have the economic resources to get this kind of equipment.
And this makes a hard situation for parents to give education parents that work and have to give the time-- separate the time-- to pay attention to what the teacher is telling to his son. And the special education is an individualized service, but during the situation of the pandemic, not necessarily was offered the same way.
And this is a really big challenge for people on the island because-- first of all, on the island, we have a large number of poverty. It's like 49% of the people on the island live on the poverty level. So we implement one regulation to all people, but we don't look what are the special needs that every family and house have for people with disabilities.
MILDRED GOMEZ: Joe, this is Mildred.
JOE ZESKI: Yes.
MILDRED GOMEZ: I know that a Spanish speaker is putting in some questions or statements in the chat. And I just have to mention that they are mentioned the same thing that we are saying-- that most of the parents don't have the resources, and they are not experts in technology. So that affects how parents help their children. They said in the chat too that sometimes teachers are not experts. We're not experts in technology. So they are not able even to teach or learn or be there for the students. And about the related services-- that was an issue that Archie mentioned too.
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JOE ZESKI: Well, I hope you enjoyed this week's edition of Ask About the ADA, where we focused on education and the challenges surrounding it for individuals with disabilities in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. If you want to know more about what we spoke about today, or if you have any other questions about the Americans with Disabilities Act and the rights that apply to the education setting, please reach out to us here at the Northeast ADA. You can visit our website, NortheastADA.org. You can call us at 1-800-949-4232. And of course, you can also follow us on social media. Just look for @NortheastADA.
Once again, I'm Joe Zeski, program manager here at the Northeast ADA Center. Thanks as always to Grace Fairchild, our student producer and worker who has been invaluable in creating these podcasts and who will shortly be moving on to bigger and better things as she is graduating from Cornell. We wish her the very best in all that lies ahead for her. And thanks again to Peter Quinn of the Yang Tan Institute, who does the final polishing on the podcast to make sure it's ready to go. And meanwhile, we hope that you stay engaged and involved in the conversation.
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