Immortelle School and Pre-Vocational Centre

For the past couple of months, we had been hearing from students that completed their placements in Trinidad in past years and members in the Trinidad Working group at UofT what the Immortelle school was like and some of the types of diagnoses we would encounter, but it was still difficult to form a clear picture of what to expect.
Having spent a week at the school and pre-vocational centre so far, it's fair to say that it has surpassed our expectations. This is the first year that the pre-vocational centre and the immortelle school have joined and are located in the same centre, which has made it really easy for us to juggle our time between the two.

 The Immortelle school is designed specifically for children with disabilities ranging from 4-33 years old, most of which are on the autism spectrum, have learning disabilities and very few of them have physical disabilities and several have unidentified diagnoses. We have had the opportunity to really get to know some of the students and are greeted every morning with beautiful smiles and enthusiastic greetings!

The pre-vocational centre is geared towards older students with a varied range in ages and functional abilities. The centre has classes in arts and crafts, culinary, computers, spa and current affairs/finance. We have spend some time in each of the classes already and are eager to make recommendations to the teachers to make sure that each student is getting most of each of the classes and the lessons taught are best fit for each of the student's preferences and abilities.

This is where we will be spending most of our time for the next six weeks. It has only been a week of mostly observation and determining where we can best allocate our time and we are hoping that by this week we will have a more established routine!