MonInfo, Mongolia reports: Following disputes concerning a previous director, students from Secondary School #116, the only school in Mongolia for visually impaired children, still suffer from a lack of resources, professionally trained teachers and help from the state authorities, according to ministerial officials. “Although the Mongolian state put more attention on disabled children’s education before 1990, it was lost from the state’s attention since that period,” B. Batbold, Chairman of Primary and Secondary Policy Coordination Department at the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science told MonInfo Wednesday.

“In the last two or three years the state only just started to pay a little attention to the education of disabled children,” he said.

Since 2004 the pupils of the visually impaired children’s school, Secondary School #116, the only one of its kind in Mongolia put demands to the Ministry of Education about improving the education environment and quality and the personal characters of the teachers and workers of the school were very bad, according to the students. Protests and a hunger strike eventually resulted in the changing of the school’s director, but even today the students frequently discuss the quality of their educational leaders.

“This year the Ministry just started to give us students’ books and until this year we couldn’t prepare for subjects because there was only one book for every other student and even the teacher had to take a book away from us to use,” students said Wednesday. Read more at MonInfo. Image copyright Luke Distelhorst.