Eleven-year-old Lerato Nkosi dreams of becoming a doctor. To realise her ambition, she dodges her mother’s protective gaze to join her boisterous peers on their walk to Vulamasango Primary School in KaNyamazane, Mpumalanga.
As the other children filter through the school gate Nkosi stops, her head drops and she draws circles in the sand with her blue tackies. The guard at the gate won’t let her through because she isn’t registered at the school.
An intellectual disability stands in the way of her receiving an education. The same fate confronts hundreds of other disabled children in the area, where no school caters for children with special educational needs.
Nkosi spends the rest of the morning hanging around the school’s grounds until her mother, Thembi Malope, comes to fetch her once she realises that her daughter has slipped out of their home to accompany her peers.
“I often find her talking to other children through the school fence and when I try to take her home she complains that she wants to go to school like her friend Uyanda,” says Malope. “I hate it when she says that because I don’t know how to respond to her.”
Back at home Nkosi keeps herself busy paging through a children’s storybook illustrated with pictures.
“If I get a chance to go to school I want to become a doctor so I can give people injections like the doctor does to me when I am ill,” she says with a smile.
In the afternoon she repeats her morning routine, rushing back to Vulamasango to meet Uyanda. She insists on carrying Uyanda’s school bag so people in the community think she has attended school.
Malope says she has unsuccessfully tried to send her daughter to three different schools. Nkosi was turned away because she can’t concentrate, shows no potential to learn how to read or write, and she often wanders out of class and gets lost during school hours.
“I approached the education department to help me find a school, but they told me the only school that could accommodate her was in Middelburg,” Malope says. “They gave me an application form to fill out and told me to wait for a response from the school.”
Malope is still waiting for a response two years later.
She says that even if her daughter cannot learn to read or write, she could learn a skill.
“I’m a dressmaker and Lerato sometimes sits next to me while I am busy on my sewing machine. Lerato imitates my work by making dolls out of strips of material that fall off my sewing machine. This indicates to me that she can work … with her hands,” Malope says.
Robert Masambo, head of the disability desk in the Office of the Premier, says his department approached the provincial Department of Education five years ago to make resources available for disabled children and to conduct workshops to change teachers’ attitudes. But little headway has been made.
“We will keep trying to persuade them because the number of disabled children who don’t attend school is growing every year,” he says. “We are depriving children of their right to an education.”
Godfrey Mgiba, spokesperson for the provincial education department, says that 10 schools in Mpumalanga are being used as pilot sites to introduce disabled pupils to mainstream schooling.
“We want to accommodate all disabled children in the province but progress is slow.”
He says some children with learning disabilities attend regular classes, but complement their schooling with remedial classes to keep up with their peers. Children with severe disabilities are referred to special schools.
Mgiba says his department knows about Nkosi’s case and will ensure that she is enrolled at a special school. — African Eye News Service