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StandProud/ACDF´s supplements its brace-provision service with an education program designed to promote the "mainstreaming" of disabled children in regular schools.
All too often, physically disabled children in DR Congo have been automatically assumed to have limited intellectual potential, or to have an otherwise limited capacity to contribute to society in the same ways that everyone else does. A result of this erroneous assumption is that many disabled children were never encouraged to attend school at all, or were shunted off at an early age to special segregated schools for the disabled to learn vocational skills such as tailoring, shoe-making, ceramics, etc.
StandProud and ACDF believe that disabled youths´ intellectual and academic potential should receive the same opportunity for full development as that of children who are not physically disabled, and that the decision to go a vocational route should be made by the individual him/herself after having been exposed to the full range of options (rather than be something pre-determined by parents or teachers for reason of physical disability).
For this reason, StandProud supports an ACDF program which encourages parents of disabled school-age beneficiaries of ACDF´s brace-crafting services to send these children to "normal" neighborhood schools by counseling parents and helping them, to some degree, to cover school fees.
In addition to giving the disabled children the same opportunity to develop as others, the integration of the disabled children in regular classrooms serves to demonstrate to all--teachers, parents, other children, as well as the disabled students themselves--that there is no necessary correlation between physical handicap and intellectual capacity, and that disabled individuals can contribute to society to the same extent as everyone else.
Furthermore, classroom integration helps to permanently "demystify" disability for teachers and other students. Having seen and interacted with disabled persons every day at school--and thus had the opportunity to learn first hand just how "normal" disabled children really are-non--disabled persons will be less likely to avoid social contact with disabled persons outside school and later in life, and will be able to counteract false and damaging misinformation regarding the disabled that circulates in the society in general.
