Letter to the Editors

I'd like to tell you about the second year of the CAPSLE in our school.

This was a very difficult school year, because the school was nationalized. There are many uncertainties, contradictory information, and the teachers have been affected by withdrawals and losses. By the end of the year, turmoil ensued, the curricula and the pedagogic program of the school had to be rewritten. Meanwhile, often there was no money for the most basic things, such as paper or medicine. The new law completely ignores that boarding schools for special needs children are different from normal schools. Because of that, several people are taken from us: the optometrist and the night nurse (even though we have children with serious conditions, such as a girl with a transplanted lung or a boy with a transplanted heart) the kitchen staff at weekends (though it's a boarding school, so there are children present at weekends) the speech therapists, the physical therapists, the psychologists.

In such an environment, we continued with CAPSLE, with overladen, embittered and confused teachers. We held 25 meetings between September and June, and on the last one, we stated that we were responsible for all the good things this year. Such things were the Bear Year, the Big Bear Day, the start of the Gentle Warrior program, the Samovar Clubs, the milieu therapy camp which was covered by television, and at the end, the hiking for the school staff. There hasn't been such an event for 20 years, though all the old colleagues kept saying that it'd be good to organize one again. There was no money for it, of course, so we organized the low budget team-building hike for the day after the last day of school. The people who had cars chauffeured the others, the kitchen gave stuff to cook, and we went to cheap places. The hike went very well and the principal came along with her two deputies, which meant a lot regarding the program's support. The form teachers came along with the kitchen staff, the afternoon teacher