A 20-year-old classification error has led to the impending closure of a facility that provided for children with special needs Nawaal Deane and Roshila Pillay ‘Thank you for the world so sweet …” Two voices pipe up while the other children either hum along or listen intently. There are six children sitting in a large room inhabited also by a variety of toys, a guitar, a drum, xylophone and Bob the hamster (in his cage). It is snack time and Elaine Charles, the classroom assistant at the Blind and Visually Impaired Children’s Centre, feeds one of the children because she has no hands to do so herself. Her semblance of a face has been burned to such an extent that she cannot see. She is Dorah Mokoena. For the past five months Dorah has made the centre, in Parktown, Johannesburg, her home away from home. She was blinded as a baby six years ago in a shack fire in Botleng, near Delmas, and spent months at a hospital where she had been abandoned until Bronwen Jones, now her foster mother, read about her and began visiting her regularly. Jones’s struggle to find a school that would cater for a child like Dorah – with multiple disabilities – finally ended when she discovered the centre. “They’re really good with her. They have a special water playroom and a therapy room for the children, which helps with motor development,” she says. The positive contribution and improvements the centre has made so far will be a short- lived reprieve for Dorah. A mere glitch in the classification of the school when it was founded two decades ago has resulted in the impending closure of an establishment that has proved indispensable in responding to the special needs of disabled children. The school has been involved in negotiations spanning two years with Cordy Mageza, the Gauteng head of the Education for Learners with Special Education Needs (Elsen) unit. Its attempts to have the school reclassified as an Elsen institute instead of a public pre-primary school have been unsuccessful. Mageza refused to comment on the Elsen unit’s decision on the centre’s status, referring enquiries to another official, who was unavailable. Teachers working at public pre-primary schools are at present on the government’s payroll. “The larger percentage of children attending these public pre-primary schools is white – the smaller portion of South Africa’s population – yet we spend R48- million of our budget on them. We want to get rid of payments to these sector schools and spread that budget out evenly,” explains Mzwandile Kibi, the director for pre-primary education at the provincial Department of Education in Johannesburg. In real terms this means that these public pre-primary school teachers will be transferred to other schools and pre- primary schools will have to register as private schools and find funding from the private sector to pay for their own teachers. The Blind and Visually Impaired Children’s Centre is no exception. The centre is a microcosm of the issues special schools face throughout South Africa. It is split into two classes – one for children with behavioural problems and another for children who are blind or visually impaired. “The children at the centre require early intervention from a multi-disciplinary team so that they are developed enough to enter a special school,” says Elzet Utley, the centre manager. A multi-disciplinary team includes an occupational therapist, physiotherapist, speech therapist, teacher, social worker, paediatrician and an orientation and mobility instructor. They work together as a unit to maximise each child’s full functional potential. The education department subsidises some of the therapists’ salaries but therapists are largely viewed as a luxury – here, as in other special schools. Therapists evaluate children and teach them to perform certain motor skills that are often taken for granted. “Because Dorah has no hands a teacher might be under the impression that she cannot draw. In this case an occupational therapist will suggest adaptive devices, like splints, so that Dorah can draw. This is why we need to have a holistic approach,” explains Utley. Posts are often frozen when therapists leave.
“Most large schools for cerebral palsied children do have therapists; however, their numbers have been downsized,” says Belinda Sampson, president of the South African Riding for the Disabled Association (Sarda).
Sarda is an independent organisation that runs therapeutic riding programmes nationally for disabled children. Riding offers numerous benefits for a disabled child including developing eye and hand coordination, improving memory, concentration and motor skills. One of Sarda’s Gauteng branches was forced to turn away an entire school simply because the school did not have an occupational therapist to evaluate which of their students could benefit from riding. “Most of these children never see a therapist unless they are evaluated at a special school,” says Eleanor Woodman, Sarda vice-chair. There are long-term changes due to include disabled children in mainstream schools. In the pipeline is a follow-up draft White Paper based on the Salamanca Resolution, taken at a 1994 Unesco conference in Spain, stipulating that every country around the world should have equal educational opportunities for all. It has been interpreted worldwide as a recommendation for mainstreaming disabled learners. In line with this the South African government aims to mainstream as many as possible of the 400E000 disabled children completely excluded from formal education as well as those currently accommodated in special schools by training teachers and adapting school facilities. “The disabled pupil should not have to adapt to the [current] system. The [mainstream] education system should cater for all pupils’ needs, irrespective of what these may be,” emphasises Elsa Wessels, the project manager for the Elsen advocacy campaign project, a directorate of the Department of Education. Mlungisi Khumalo, division coordinator for education at the South African Federal Council on Disability, also sees mainstreaming as the only solution to prevent marginalisation of children with disabilities. “Ideally the government should implement a system of inclusion [mainstreaming] to accommodate the large percentage of disabled children who are presently not part of the education system,” says Khumalo.
Mainstreaming does not mean the end of special schools – or that all types of disabled children will be placed in normal schools. Disabled children will be evaluated and then placed in an appropriate school. A paraplegic child who is mentally capable is at present not allowed to attend a normal school because they do not possess the infrastructure or expertise to satisfy his needs. Mainstreaming aims to rectify such disparities. The concept has been met with much criticism from people involved in the disabled sector. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Disabled children will not be discriminated against in a normal school,” says Woodman. The attention disabled children require, coupled with teachers’ lack of skills, would make implementing mainstreaming extremely difficult, she says. However, Wessels sees the upcoming changes as the only way to deal with past injustices. “The system has to be changed” – although she estimates it will take about 20 years. Meanwhile the centre’s 15 children will be left with no school by the end of December when their school closes for good. An education system that consistently failed to provide for Dorah is now allowing the closure of a school that has played a positive role in her life – merely because of a 20-year-old classification error.