On a bright Monday, a dozen smartly dressed blind students slowly walked to their classroom after the morning assembly.

The students hand their canes on hooks outside a doorway to their classroom then adeptly touch wooden desks to identify their assigned spots.

These visually-impaired students at DCT-Mvumi secondary school located 36 kilometers (22 miles) from Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma City, seem to take advantage of the facilities, including braille textbooks perched on shelves and tablets loaded with specially designed apps to help those with partial blindness to see what is on the board.

Mvumi is the only school in Tanzania with requisite teaching materials and equipment for visually impaired students, thanks to the Lutheran Church’s Central Diocese.

At the school, visually impaired students can be spotted decoding texts on Braille machines or taking notes with the help of fellow students.

While the state-of-the-art facilities are cause for celebration for these students, it is a far cry for their counterparts elsewhere in Tanzania whose academic future is increasingly becoming bleak.

Shortage of special teachers

As nations mark White Cane Day, blind and visually impaired students in the East African country have been pushed on the wobbly edge of survival due to a shortage of teachers with special skills and requisite learning materials.

While children are entitled to better education, blind students in Tanzania face many hurdles due to deeply rooted and unfounded beliefs that being blind is a curse.

“We don’t have teachers with special skills to understand the needs of blind children,” said Lilian Ntunge, a visually impaired student at Nkuhungu secondary school in Dodoma.

A recent study by HakiElimu, a Tanzanian nonprofit education organization, found that even in schools deemed “inclusive,” the environment was not very friendly for students with visual impairment. Very few schools exist in Tanzania specifically for people with disabilities of any kind.

The report revealed that many students still face unqualified, incompetent teachers and inadequate teaching materials for visually-impaired learners.

The country joined a global movement to create inclusive, quality education for diverse learners, including students with disabilities. In 2004, it introduced a national disability policy emphasizing the need for a conducive learning environment for people with special needs, and the country’s Ministry of Education adopted it in 2009.

Yet, schools still face several challenges in terms of inclusive, quality education.

Cognitive skills

While special education activists in Tanzania call for inclusive mainstream education, some teachers for the blind who spoke with the Anadolu Agency are touting special classes to sharpen cognitive skills to understand teachers' instructions and control body movement to interact in the physical world.

“Blind children must learn how to use other sensory skills such as touch, smell and taste to understand classroom lessons,” said Mary Mokiwa, a special needs teacher.

She said classroom lessons are focused on developing a set of skills and the use of tools adapted for blindness.

“Verbal lessons on how to maneuver using a cane can greatly help break barriers of isolation for the blind,” Mokiwa told Anadolu Agency.

She said teachers need to work with parents to understand students' learning patterns.

Salome Lembeli, a 15-year-old student at Nkuhungu secondary school who was born blind, said she is disappointed by the learning condition at her school where students with special needs like her do not get the attention they deserve.

“I don’t like to be in a mixed classroom, because often teachers ignore us,” she told Anadolu Agency.

For 15-year-old Khalfan Ahmed, a visually impaired student at Dodoma Secondary School, following daily lessons is a constant struggle.

On cloudy days, it gets a little harder.

With the aid of a cane, he routinely walks to the front of the dimly lit classroom and peers intently at the blackboard, to read what his science teacher has written.

“When the writing is too small. I don’t see them no matter how close I am to the blackboard,” he said.

Ahmed, who was diagnosed with congenital glaucoma -- a condition making him unable to see in dim light, wears heavy eyeglasses which he said makes him dizzy at times.

He reads a book by holding it inches from his eyes./aa

Britain’s Cambridge University has suspended a record £400 million deal with the United Arab Emirates over the latter’s alleged use of Pegasus spyware, The Guardian reported Thursday.

The decision was made public by Stephen Toope, the university’s outgoing vice-chancellor.

As recently as July, the proposed deal was praised as a potential “strategic partnership” aimed at helping resolve “some of the greatest challenges facing our planet.” A donation of over £310 million over a decade would have also been included. It would have been the biggest donation of its kind to the university.

This has now been undone by the UAE’s alleged use of Pegasus phone hacking spyware developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group. The Guardian claims that many of the UK phone numbers targeted by the spyware were at the apparent behest of the UAE. NSO Group has previously denied any wrongdoing.

In an interview with the student newspaper Varsity, Toole said: “There were further revelations about Pegasus that really caused us to decide that it’s not the right time to be pursuing these kinds of really ambitious plans with the UAE.”

“No one’s going to be rushing into this,” he added. “There will be no secret arrangements being made. I think we’re going to have to have a robust discussion at some point in the future. Or we may determine that it’s not worth raising again. I honestly don’t know.

“There are existing relationships across the university on a departmental and individual academic level, but there are no conversations about a big project,” he continued. “We’re aware of the risks in dealing with many states around the world, but we think it’s worth having the conversation,” he added.

The Guardian reported that according to documents it had seen, the proposed collaboration would have seen joint UAE and Cambridge University branding and new institutions being based in the UAE. It also reported that there were concerns over closer ties with the UAE due to its human rights record.

Varsity meanwhile reported that the deal was intended to upgrade the education system in the UAE and work on questions of climate and energy transition, adding it would have also focused on the exchange of Islamic and Western cultures.

A university spokesperson was quoted by the Guardian as saying: “The University of Cambridge has numerous partnerships with governments and organizations around the world. It approached the UAE as it does all potential partnerships: with an open mind, and rigorously weighing the opportunities to contribute to society – through collaborative research, education and innovation – against any challenges.”

“We will be reflecting over the next few months before further evaluating our long- term options with our partners and with the university community,” he added./agencies

Students adjusting to another school year disrupted by COVID-19 also face a different kind of public-health threat: record gun violence.

Between Aug.1 and Sept. 15, at least 30 instances of gunfire occurred on U.S. school grounds, according to data from the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety. The shootings killed five people and wounded another 23.

That marks the highest number of campus shootings in a back-to-school season since Everytown began tracking data in 2013. All in all, there have been nearly twice as many shootings in schools so far this fall compared to pre-pandemic levels. From the beginning of August through the first week of October at least 36 shootings wreaked havoc in schools in 21 states, according to Gun Violence Archive data. Over the same time period from 2016 to 2019, the country averaged 17 shootings in schools.

Such violence has left countless other witnesses and community members traumatized – all at a time when students and educators are already struggling emotionally. In some cases, schools’ responses may unintentionally make the trauma worse.

Families depart a performing arts center Wednesday in Mansfield, Texas, after being united with students from Timberview High School. Police in Texas arrested a student suspected of opening fire during a fight at the Arlington-area high school, leaving four people injured.More

Last week, four people were injured in a shooting at a school in Arlington, Texas. The accused perpetrator, charged with opening fire during a fight at the high school, was a fellow student who’d reportedly been bullied.

The pandemic has fueled a mental-health crisis across the country. Schools are grappling with heightened levels of depression and anxiety among both students and staff. Frank Kitzerow, the police chief for Florida’s Palm Beach County School District, points to a possible correlation between this trend and the increase in school-based gun violence.

“Schools are a microcosm of their communities,” Kitzerow said, citing FBI data showing an uptick in homicides. “It should be a clue and a wake-up call for us. … What we see in the communities is coming into our schools.”

On Sept. 1, the eighth day of classes, one student fatally shot another inside a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, high school, causing campuses throughout the district to lock down for hours. Recovery from the shooting has been “long and difficult,” Laurie Schaefer, a teacher at Mount Tabor High School, told USA TODAY. And the school’s healing process became particularly difficult when a gun was found in a student's backpack late last month and another in a nearby middle school the following week, she said.

Active shooter drills could make trauma worse

Incidents like these are a reminder that schools ought to explore a suite of preventative measures that prioritize mental health, according to Kitzerow. Yet reactive, potentially traumatizing practices such as active shooter drills have grown in popularity.

In the most extreme version of these drills, the school stages an active shooting unannounced, leading students to believe they’re actually under attack. Research shows an association between the drills and significant, lasting increases in depression, stress and anxiety among students, parents and educators.

“As a high-school student, when we go through these drills, they’re really traumatizing – it’s hard for us to adapt to learning afterwards, for us to sit through the drill,” said Peren Tiemann, a volunteer with Lakeland High School Students Demand Action, a gun-control advocacy group in Oregon.

In Tiemann’s experience, miscommunication surrounding such drills can leave students feeling helpless and confused. Once her school staged a drill in which the hypothetical shooter was supposed to be off school grounds, but she and her peers were under the impression that person was on campus. Chaos ensued, she said, with different classrooms responding in different ways.

Tiemann has led efforts at her school to change its safety practices. Among the reforms: removing simulation-based drills, improving communication and ensuring students have a “breathing period” after a drill before resuming their learning.

Such reforms are especially urgent now, Tiemann said. “For so many of us, going back to school added a whole other level of stress,” she said. “Now, it’s possible to have school at home. … When we have these drills, it just reminds so many of (us) that there could have been another option if we had just stayed home.”

For Justin Funez, a University of Chicago student and volunteer with Students Demand Action, an organization that works to end gun violence, reforms should also extend beyond school grounds. Most of the gun violence that children experience occurs off-campus – and that’s particularly true in low-income communities, where students often learn in classrooms with the sounds of sirens in the background.

“How can you do your homework if you’re worried about that?” Funez posed. “How many clubs can you actually participate in if you know you have to be home before” the gunfire erupts?

  USA TODAY.

Protesters clashed with police in Athens on Friday during a demonstration against a new education law, according to local media.

About 3,000 people affiliated with school teachers’ unions marched in protest of the legislation, according to the daily Kathimerini.

Police used tear gas and water cannons to stop the crowd, which was blocking a main road in the capital.

The unions are protesting the law, which makes teacher and school evaluations mandatory. They also voiced discontent at a court ruling Thursday that prohibited the strike.

Roadblocks were set up on several major streets in Athens to prevent demonstrators from blocking them.

No arrests have been reported.

On Thursday, Education Minister Niki Kerameus sued the two unions affiliated with private and public school teachers over the plan to strike, which she said was illegal./aa