“You won’t understand what it means to carry the label of THAT school!”

Mariam and Adrine (not their real names) are alumni of one of Yerevan’s special schools. The school is called “special” because only children with intellectual disabilities study there. “No matter how many stories I tell, you won’t understand what it means to carry the label of that school,” says Mariam.

“I remember, I was 15 years old and I could understand many things around me. One day we took the bus with a school friend of mine and a boy was staring at me. After a while, our teacher turned to that boy and said, “Don’t stare at her, she is from the ‘idiot’s school’,” recounts Mariam.

Adrine also felt depressed at the special school and twice tried to run away from the school. “Children in our class had different intellectual disabilities. I don’t think it was correct to gather us all together. I didn’t like that school. I wish I could have gone to a regular school. Children in the regular schools are also different, some are clever, others are not, but neither the teachers nor the other students call them stupid.”

Adrine believes that children with intellectual disabilities could study better at a regular mainstream school. She says, “When do people study well? When they have an example, when they can see a role model among their classmates. We had a number of children in our classroom who were capable and had the potential to study well, but to the teachers all the students seemed the same, and they did not teach well.”

Mariam knows that society has a negative attitude towards students of special schools. “When people find out that you attended a special school, they immediately think that you are abnormal or insane, and that you don’t understand anything. People called us idiots so many times that we even started to believe that it was true.”

After graduation, the girls faced new challenges. Mariam couldn’t find her place in life; at first some friends arranged employment for her at a night club, after that she went to Russia, and now she temporarily lives with her sister. Adrine got married and divorced, and now she works at a beauty salon as a manicurist.

There are currently 23 functioning special educational institutions in Armenia, where about 2300 children were enrolled during the 2013-2014 school year. Of those 23 special schools, 15 of them are especially for children with intellectual disabilities.

Full text in Armenian