Dubai mum sets up special ‘school’ after son is rejected by 22 schools

Dubai: A Dubai-based mum, whose autistic son was denied a seat by 22 schools, today runs a special needs centre, so no child meets with the same fate as her boy.

Sharing her inspiring story with Gulf News, Rana Akkad, a Syrian expat, said, “Yes, my son Jad Atassi got rejected from 22 schools in Dubai. I tried it all, the cheap, expensive, high quality, and the low. I even tried putting him in a special needs centre, but the cases there were more severe than him, and he sadly started regressing physically. Jad was non-verbal and had some behaviour issues but never had any physical disability,”

Rana, who moved to Dubai 22 years ago, said she started noticing that Jad wasn’t interacting or having eye contact with others when he was one and a half years old. “He was able to say mama, baba, ball, and hello while holding a toy phone, but all of a sudden, it vanished.”

Subsequently, he was clinically diagnosed with autism.

‘Sake of belonging’

Although the family learnt how to cope with his condition, the hunt for a school became a veritable battle.

“When he finally got admission into a school after 22 rejections, the struggle only worsened,” said Rana.

“I eventually got him accepted in a school that was closed down by the authorities a couple of years later,” she said, noting that she was sharing the experience, only to give people an idea of the condition of the school she was willing to put her son in “for the sake of belonging”.

She recalled how the first couple of years were fine.

“Jad used to go with his shadow teacher, and the other students always included him, thinking he was the boy who didn’t speak English, this is how innocent the kids were. Sadly, over time, they stopped interacting with him. I kept on faking, not noticing that until one day when I was picking him up from school, he was walking beside me but all of a sudden stopped.

"I kept calling out to him, but he totally ignored me, looking somewhere else. When I checked where he was looking, I saw all his friends going in a car to one of the boy’s houses. The sadness in my son’s eyes simply killed me,” she recollected.

It was at that moment that Rana knew she had to do something for Jad and those like him.

Creating a safe space

“I realised that this fight for Jad being in a mainstream school was not for him, but simply to satisfy my own ego that my son belonged somewhere. I learned that a mother can move heaven and earth for her child but can not bribe or force a nine-year-old to befriend her son. It struck me that I was fighting the wrong fight and wasting my energy forcing my son where he didn’t belong.”

She was determined to focus on creating a safe space for him.

Four years of learning, planning and resourcing later, Rana set up a special needs centre called Modern Alternative Education with 11 students, including Jad, in October 2016.

“By the time I opened the school, Jad was borderline depressed. But in this new set up, you could see the joy and glow coming back to his eyes. He now had friends and was part of a community.”

Resolve strengthens

Tragically, however, Jad passed away in a case of sudden death two years later. He was 11.

Rana clarified that the death had nothing to do with his autism. “He simply went to sleep and never woke up, his heart just stopped. It was like Sudden Infant Death, which rarely happens during the adolescent years,” she explained.

Jad’s death only strengthened Rana’s resolve to continue with the centre, whose name she changed to Jad’s Inclusion.

“Thanks to Jad’s Inclusion, I was able to continue after losing Jad. I convinced myself that he was an angel that only came for the mission of creating a place for children like him. Once achieved, he went back to where he belonged. This is why the thought of shutting down the centre was never an option. I changed the name of Modern Alternative Education to Jad’s Inclusion on what would have been his 12th birthday on January 31, 2019, and planted an olive tree in his memory,” said Rana.

So how different is Jad’s Inclusion from other schools?

What the centre covers

“Jad’s Inclusion is a special needs centre structured like a school,” explained Rana.

“We open September to July, Monday to Friday, 8.30am to 2.30pm for our academic programme. We cover basic academics from 8.30am to 12 noon - Math, English and Science - according to the students’ ability of course. Form 12 noon to 2.30pm, we focus on life skills and vocational programme. We also run vocational and social clubs in the afternoon for non-JI students along with therapy sessions.

"Our maximum capacity is 40 students at a time since our main goal is not to keep the students with us for long but to eventually integrate them into mainstream schools or jobs through our ASDAN and internship programmes.”

Rana said, “What makes us special is our small classroom size, with six-eight students and three-four staff members in each classroom. There’s a SEN teacher, a teacher assistant, and at least one or two shadow teachers. We are currently 20 staff members to 25 students.”

As for eligibility, Rana said the centre is open to anyone who is struggling with the system. “We run a free-of-charge assessment and accordingly, advise parents to either keep their children in the mainstream system as long as it is not causing any mental or emotional harm.

"We also refer a lot of other children to some of the amazing special needs centres that might be less challenging academically than ours. The special needs spectrum is very wide, and for sure, not every size fits all."

She said, "The fact that Jad didn’t belong in one does not make that centre bad, it just didn’t cater to his ability. Jad’s Inclusion seeks to cater to the specific criteria that do not belong in the mainstream system, yet their impairment is not severe enough to be in a special needs one.”