Michael Lipford Teaches In India

Mullica Township’s Michael Lipford worked for many years with children with physical and emotional challenges in South Jersey. 

Lipford said his career path would be more difficult in South Jersey during tough economic times, he said.

“No one was getting hired,” he said of the job environment starting in about 2010. “I saw non-tenured teachers getting pink slips.”

So when parents of a child with learning challenges asked him to come to Jakarta, Indonesia, to work with their child, he said yes. That was in 2011, and after a couple of years there, he moved to India.

After a year working for the family in Jakarta, he took a yearlong job with a French international school there, he said. Then he went to a job fair in Dubai, where he was hired by the private Oberoi International School in Mumbai, India. He’s just signed a contract to teach a third year there, he said, working with special education students.

Lipford, who grew up in Mullica Township, now gets back twice a year to see his parents, Gilbert and Eartha Lipford. They have lived in Mullica more than 50 years, he said.

He’s spending the summer in a friend’s house in Brigantine, he said.

“It’s a British curriculum, so it runs on the same schedule, with many of the same holidays,” he said.

The school predominantly serves local students, but also has expatriate students from the United Kingdom, Europe, America, Argentina, and other countries. English is the main language spoken, he said.

“I work with kids with disabilities in an inclusion program,” he said. “The main thing is to get them to be independent and believe in themselves. Most do have the ability.”

He said his students, who are high functioning, may be on the autism spectrum or have some learning disabilities or emotional issues, but all have strengths they can develop.

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http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/education/former-mullica-resident-finds-a-teaching-job-in-india/article_ae56c6fc-1883-11e5-b247-eb2d78a48891.html