A South Morang mother who has three children with autism says Melbourne’s north is in desperate need of education funding for children with special needs.
Mother of four Natasha Ngarua said the needs of children with autism were being severely neglected.
She is lobbying the state government to improve the learning conditions of children with special needs in Whittlesea and has created a petition at www.change.org calling on all levels of government
to urgently address the issue.
She has established a support group for parents and guardians of children with autism and set up an advocacy group on Facebook.
Since the state and federal budgets were released, signatures for her petition have soared from 200 to almost 800.
Her two sons, aged 10 and 14, have attended four mainstream schools between them in Melbourne’s north.
They did not fit the criteria to be enrolled in a special-needs school.
She said many parents of children with autism feared that a special-needs school could limit their child’s ability to learn.
“For high-functioning autistic children, it can institutionalise them and not give them the every day skills they need,” she said. “But it is also extremely difficult to get children into special-needs school, because unless they have an intellectual disability as well then they do not meet the criteria to even get a place.”
Ms Ngarua is concerned that unless more funding was pumped into special education services in Melbourne’s north, her four-year-old autistic daughter, Thalia, 4, would struggle to settle into school.
Ms Ngarua is calling for a commitment of funding from the state government for more teachers’ aides in mainstream schools and more training for mainstream teachers in supporting special-needs children. Ms Ngarua is meeting with Liberal Upper House MP Craig Ondarchie next Friday and plans to meet with Greens and Labor state MPs next month in the hope of securing funding before the November state election.
The state government allocated $2.3 million in its budget for the Hume Valley Special School in Broadmeadows to finish renovations and build a performing arts hub. It also will inject $4 million into the Broadmeadows Special Developmental School and $3 million for the Northern School for Autism.
Education Minister Martin Dixon said the state government had provided record levels of funding for disability education across the state, including funding 150 welfare officers at 800 primary schools across Victoria.
