How to tag "special needs schools"?

General talk Tagging general discussion
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I saw Looking for feedback on Special Needs School tagging but I see the proposal vote was rejected.

How does the community deal with tagging “special needs schools”?

Special needs schools are often schools chiefly for disabled children/adults to try gaining some skills where personally possible. An example could be “school for the deaf” that has a main syllabus on teaching handsign languages.

Note that “baseline” schools may sometimes accept pupils with disabilities as per government policies (e.g. afaik Hong Kong schools sometimes do that as per government policy), but this kind of school is not to be considered “special needs schools” because the syllabus is still the “baseline” syllabus.

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I’d probably go with amenity=school + school=special_education_needs (or some other school=* tag) + description=* along with other standard tags pointing to more information (website=*, wikidata=*, etc)

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What about a school with both normal and special classes ?

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Some possibilities came up in this discussion about replacing grades=SP (which was a bad idea). I noticed that the Philippine community has standardized on education_program=specialized_education specialized_education=special_needs. It seems fine semantically, though unfortunately it’s a lot of typing and three strikes against British English.

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Would education:special=* work? Example school for the deaf would be education=school with education:special=deaf

The naming comes from “special education”, which afaik is British English.

This preserves the type of school, while also providing more detail to what kind of special education the school may be providing. Omission of education:special would presume “baseline” schools with no inherent assistance to challenged/handicapped students.

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If you’re able to qualify the form of special education to that degree, then school:for=deaf would avoid the term special education, which has different connotations from place to place. If the school offers both specialized and mainstream education, it could be something like school:for=mainstream;deaf. The special_needs value comes about in systems where some schools are required to admit everyone, regardless of their needs, and provide special accommodation for any form of special need that they present.

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school:for was proposed in that linked discussion, but (overwhelmingly) rejected…

Doesn’t mean it can’t be used, but it is a good indicator one would do well to find previous discussions and votes and research them why it was rejected, and what were proposed alternatives, and did any of them looked more acceptable?

(but it needs some work, so requires someone more interested in subject to dig in)

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education:*= is a meaningless prefix here. It would be interpreted based on special= , which isn’t meaningful either. At least special_education , but less worse special_needs= to avoid repeating “education”, and shows it’s for the needs.
school:for= at least follows social_facility:for= , and shows it’s for users. Similar to the latter, it has problems with mixing different aspects. Aside from SEN, it could be for boys vs girls schools ( male= vs female= has another problem with mixing access= legal restriction, and service provision ie other genders allowed to enter) , foreigner-only international schools (a further problem here is whether *:for= is absolute, or suggested, for foreigner-priority ones), etc.
Although school:gender= was mostly imported, it’s worth considering for the limited possibilities , suggesting the school:*= could be more specific. On the other hand, one reason I voted against school:for= is it being proposed by one author to apply to non =school features, so the need for a generic attribute needs to be assessed.
Looking at that proposal in detail, =mainstream isn’t quite clear. school:for= has poor definition as seen from other special needs, being explained as “School with facilities for pupils”, which can be other modes of special education, not special schools.

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I started working on a proposal for tagging special needs schools, but also institutions in general, because – depending on how you define special needs – it could also mean people with physical disabilities.

The basic principle I use is special_needs=yes/no/limited/only for the institution as a whole, and then special_needs:<type>=(yes)/no/separated/mixed/limited, e.g. special_needs:learning_disability=mixed for inclusion-based approach for children with learning disability. But it’s a complex field with lots of potential mines to step on language-wise…

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