kochi on saturday at the conference hall of a hotel in munnar a group of students gave a scintillating dance performance before the start of an international seminar which saw delegates from sweden israel australia and the us when it ended there was an applause which transformed into a standing ovation that lasted several minutes nothing unusual but for a simple fact the children were all with special needsthe seminar on recent trends in special education was held as part of the 25th year celebrations of the developmental activities in rehabilitative education dare school munnar an institution which enabled them do many things in life apart from dancing dare is a successful project in teaching the differentlyabled children to survive in the normal worldfounded in 1991 by dolly lai wife of a tata tea now tata a tata tea now tata global beverages ltd manager as a centre for motor coordination and basic education dare school started with five students over its 25 years of existence it has taught and trained 205 students currently there are 62 students of 4 to 18 years of agebefore we started in 1991 there was no avenue for these special children they were left at home when their parents went to work and in 1991 for the first time the disability was talked about all the time it was a stigma and parents didnt want to talk about their children with special needs slowly the task of the initial years was to bring these people out of their homes to the dare schoolso we started it with five or six children and gradually as the word spread the parents started sending their children herenow dare alone has 65 students and the whole of srishti with the four units we have 165 associates said ratna krishnakumar managing trustee of srishti charitable trust that runs the srishti welfare centre which houses dare schoolchildren are taught life skills reading and writing basic mathematics and arts they are also taught how to cook they are given money and a list to go to the market they are readied to go to the outside world and fend for themselves they cook their own midday meals and share with all others at the school said ratnarehabilitating the children was another question i started the strawberry preserve in dare in 1994 since i felt that we needed to build a corpus of funds to fall back on in case tea didnt do well one year and funds fall short we made strawberry jam with locally grown fruit and packed them in recycled horlicks bottles we marketed it in kolkata initially in a health food shop with typewritten labels on receiving good response we ventured forth to get an fpo food products order licence and a professional packing today we manufacture thousands of kilos of strawberry preserve guava jam plum jam orange mar malade with specially grown seville oranges passion fruit sauce orange squash all without preservatives in a state of the