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Thursday, August 11, 2022
The Colombian State approved Law 2216 this year, which promotes inclusive education for children with learning difficulties, being included in regular schools throughout the country.
The lawyers who lived through the transition to the 1991 Constitution fought for article 68 to guarantee the education of people with disabilities, in what is now called inclusive education.
Subsequently, we worked so that article 48 of the General Law of Education, Law 115 of 1994, established the obligation for the National Government and the territorial entities to incorporate in their development plans pedagogical support programs that allow covering the educational attention to the People with disabilities.
I also remember the work groups in which we incorporated article 11 of Law 361 of 1997, establishing that no one may be discriminated against, due to their disability, to access the education service, whether in a public or private entity and to any level of training.
Along these same lines, Decree 366 of 2009 organized the pedagogical support service to offer inclusive education to students who encounter barriers to learning and participation due to their disability condition.
For its part, in the Statutory Law on Disability, 1618 of 2013, which I had the opportunity to draft, we make it explicit that the Ministry of National Education will define the policy and regulate the educational care scheme for the population with special educational needs, guaranteeing care comprehensive education for the population with disabilities.
For this reason, the Government approved Decree 1421 of 2017, regulating Law 1618, establishing the route, scheme and conditions for educational attention to the population with disabilities at the preschool, basic and middle levels.
It also applies to entities in the educational sector at the national level such as: National Institute for the Blind (Inci), National Institute for the Deaf (Insor) and the Colombian Institute for the Evaluation of Education (Icfes).
The new advance is Law 2216 of this year, which aims to “promote effective inclusive education and comprehensive development of children, adolescents and young people with specific learning disorders from early childhood to secondary education in public institutions. and private in the country.
The law defines as specific learning disorder those difficulties associated with the ability of the child, adolescent or young person to receive, process, analyze, or memorize information developing problems in the processes of reading, writing, arithmetic calculations and even difficulties in the acquisition knowledge, new abilities and skills, specific to the school process and performance of the boy, girl, adolescent or young person.
Law 2216 states that the Ministry of National Education will promote and accompany, in agreement with the Certified Territorial Entities in Education, the incorporation of strategies that favor inclusive education in the Institutional Educational Projects (PEI) of public and private educational establishments, in their different academic levels.
These are just some characteristics of Law 2216, which I invite you to read, so that you can measure the importance of inclusive education. With this, the State reiterates its legal and jurisprudential line of guaranteeing inclusive education for people with disabilities and learning disorders, abolishing segregated education.
