Daily Dispatch

Unconscionable set of priorities

THE Eastern Cape department of education has made headlines for all sorts of wrong reasons, but it’s decision to employ 69 district-based physiologists and therapists to speed up the placement of disabled children at special needs schools deserves much applause.

So do its efforts to rehabilitate some of the schools shut in the rationalisation process and convert them into specialised learning facilities for these children.

Yesterday we carried the heartbreaking news that 2 160 disabled children in this province are unable to go to school and wait-listed for places at the 45 special needs schools in the Eastern Cape.

These children comprise more than a fifth of the 11 000-plus disabled children wait-listed nationwide for special needs schooling.

To the department’s credit the number of special needs schools is to go up by four during this financial year. But even then, disabled children without specialised schooling will be a painful reality.

For such children and their families such a lack is devastating and debilitating.

Without an education, let alone the specialised one that many disabled children require, their future prospects become even bleaker.

On top that an immense burdens rest almost solely on the shoulders of their parents.

Over the years, we have reported the accounts of mothers of disabled children in this province who have battled to survive with little to no support. As the primary and only carers of their children, they are unable to work. Such families must often make do on child support and disability grants.

Education spokesman Loyiso Pulumani says one of the reasons the provision of specialised education is such a challenge is because of the rural nature of the Eastern Cape which includes its vast distances.

For that reason most special schools are in East London or Port Elizabeth.

Historical disparities have also presented the education department with an immense challenge. It has had the overwhelming task of streamlining a tangle of education departments inherited from two bantustans and a race-based system, as well as trying to plug the enormous gaps found.

Given such a history, one would think the plight of thousands of disabled children with schools, would weigh heavily on the hearts of government. Not only at provincial government – as seems to be the case – but that it would also be a priority for those at the highest levels of leadership.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Day after day the nation hears credible sources in parliament laying bare a completely different set of priorities.

This is corroborated by a deluge of leaked e-mails.

The extent of the theft of funds meant for the people of this country is so obscenely monumental that it beggars belief. The billions are ratcheting up too fast to tally.

But it is enough to make one want to vomit.

Even more so when one considers the 11 000 disabled children scattered around impoverished parts of the countryside for whom there are no schools at all.