Meta’s Maxine Williams joins forces with Cotton Tree Foundation: Helping children learn differently

IN Trinidad and Tobago, countless children are being left behind in the classroom, not because they are incapable of learning but because they are not being taught in the way they need.

Some are labelled as lazy, dunce or harden by adults, so they eventually withdraw, act out or fall through the cracks.

But several individuals and organisations are trying to change that, and give children with learning difficulties a fighting chance through proper assessments, support and educational intervention.

One of these people is TT-born Maxine Williams, head of accessibility and engagement at Meta, formerly Facebook.

As an attorney who worked in the criminal justice system, with human rights organisations and liaised with people at local NGOs providing prison support, Williams has seen the consequences of unmet educational needs.

She said in TT prisons, a high percentage of prisoners only had a primary school education, if that. Many could not read, and there was anxiety, anger and shame around it that could trigger them.

“We see a society where there are so many people left behind, and so we see negative impacts on all of society – people who are unproductive, not contributing, and in the worst-case scenarios, where there is destructive behaviour, lashing out, anger, violence, crime. And we can trace some of that back to when people did get left behind because they were not learning well.”

According to the World Health Organization, 15-20 per cent of the global population had some sort of disability, be it visible or invisible and temporary or permanent.

Yet, she said if the children failed to learn in expected ways, they are dismissed or described in negative terms like harden, lazy or dunce, and they become bad behaved or problematic. But often, at the root of these behaviours, there is often an undiagnosed issue getting in the way of learning.

Williams said challenges like being hard of hearing, vision loss, ADHD, autism or dyslexia can be hard to detect and if nothing is done about it, the children become marginalised.

That is why she partnered with the Cotton Tree Foundation (CTF), an NGO which has been empowering communities through education for decades.

Based in the St Ann’s area, the foundation was able to extend its reach thanks to an anonymous donor. The support allowed them to hire additional psychologists and expand their Service Learning Programme into ten schools in Port of Spain over the past year.

Their findings were concerning as about 33 per cent of every class required learning support.

Chelcie Rollock, forensic psychologist with the CTF said some children had severe reading problems, some had learning problems, behavioural problems due to family and social issues, or had difficulties with Math or critical thinking.

Williams explained, “We got teachers and principals to refer children, and then worked with the children and the parents to do the assessments. We got diagnoses and developed individualised learning plans, that we then relayed back to the teachers, to break through and help them learn in the way that they learn.”

She said more people need to donate so that CTF can help more children access the special needs interventions they need. She hoped by raising awareness, people will start similar funds at different schools or organisations, or pay for the assessment for a child.

Rollock added that the Service Learning Programme was usually run three times a year by Dr Jane Holmes Bernstein, a developmental neuropsychologist at the Boston Children’s Hospital, and CTF chair Allyson Hamel-Smith. They brought early career psychologists to do psychoeducational assessments to the students who attend the organisation’s homework centre.

Thanks to the donation, the team expanded into schools for the first time. And the expanded Service Learning Programme will continue for another year, supported by six psychologists and a trainee across the same schools.

An anonymous donor also helped establish a scholarship fund in partnership with Eshe’s Learning Centre, a co-educational school for children with learning differences. The two-year scholarship covers 50 per cent of the cost of attending the school, and the application deadline is July 7.

Williams is not new to this kind of work. For years she worked in the field of diversity, equity and inclusion, and now works in accessibility, which is about getting people with disabilities access and inclusion.

“I’ve been working for years on things that I would consider about inclusion, trying to give everyone the opportunity to live up to their potential. And as a committed Caribbean, Trinidadian person, it pained me seeing what was happening in society.

“As I looked to my own country and what's happening there I saw that there was this need, and I know the impact of it. And Cotton Tree is such a distinguished, upstanding organisation that has been working consistently for years to help communities that I reached out to them to see how we could partner to do more to help more people."

Rollock, who has been doing psychoeducational assessments for CTF for the past eight years, said in TT, people often equate the ability to maintain a conversation with academic intelligence.

So if the grades do not match that seeming competence, the children are called lazy, that they are not prioritising their schoolwork when, in reality, they have learning differences.

She explained that these differences are varied. A child might have an auditory processing disorder and be unable to fully understand or retain spoken instructions. A child with dyslexia might struggle with reading and need auditory tools to learn. Some children have trouble with grammar or sentence structure. Others may find it hard to hold a pencil or follow the pace of a lesson.

She said TT’s education system was focussed on memorisation and a lot of students do not learn in that way. Some require repetition or simplification of instructions, or they may need one-on-one sessions to make it easier for them to keep up and they feel less pressured to understand.

“If you are in front of 20-30 of your peers, you're going to feel a little embarrassed to ask a question, because you feel like you're behind. And in all of that, it also impacts their emotional standing where they feel insecure, they feel inferior, and there's even feelings of like self-loathing thinking, ‘What is wrong with me? Why can't I keep up with everyone else.’

“Compounded with all of the views of being harden or lazy from the adults, it really just warps the child's self-view and their own self-confidence in their ability to succeed academically and succeed in life, which then can lead them down to less than savoury life paths, because they've not been supported in the way that they need, and they've not been validated in their struggles.”

She believes to make an impact, to help set up a better future, it is necessary to put out the effort and support children in ways they need to succeed.

Williams concurred saying, “One of the things we want to achieve is to try to get people – parents, teachers and all of us in society – to have a different approach when you see certain behaviours, when you see certain outcomes, and think instead of what may be causing that.

“If we believe that human beings actually want to do things that are productive, they want to be healthy, they want to do what helps, sometimes the reason you see the opposite is because of what is going on inside, these unmet needs.”

While some government programmes exist, such as the Ministry of Education’s Student Support Services Division, Rollock said it is a small department with long waiting lists. A few other NGOs provide help, but awareness is low and the cost of an assessment could be a challenge to some.

And so Williams reiterated the need for greater financial support saying, “There is way more need than can be engaged. I think it starts with parents. If parents are aware, they could then seek out these different resources to get to the root of what’s happening.”

Rollock said many teachers in the programme recognised there were issues and were open to the psychologists’ recommendations, despite their already heavy workloads.

“This is why we also provide recommendations for parents because, a lot of times, teachers are taking the brunt of the responsibility for things like this. It's not something that you require specific qualifications to do.

“We try to make it as simple as possible, but there are quite a few teachers that are burnt out and I personally feel bad asking them to do more, even though they seem very willing and want to help.”

In the end, both women want to see a shift in how children are treated – to approach them with love, compassion, understanding and care – to help them become productive members of society.