With enrollment for 2022 already underway, parents who have lost their jobs due to the pandemic and unrest are finding it hard to meet enrolment requirements or to pay registration fees for their children.
Some parents have had to keep their children at home since the beginning of 2021 as they could not afford to pay the fees. Sheldon Francis from Children Have A Dream (CHAD), a non-profit organisation assisting youth and children to get places in schools, said just last week he was able to enrol two learners, who were previously without a school in 2021, for 2022.
Francis said finding place for these two children out of the many who are still without place was challenging for him and his wife. “It wasn’t an easy challenge with the Department of Education. We had to produce evidence and a portfolio of working with children with behavioural problems before the department acknowledged us. In cases where the children were out of school because of behavioural problems, we had to show that they have gone under evaluation through our organisation to get them considered for re-placement in a school,” he added.
He said not only did he have to place the two learners back into school, but his organisation will have to be in contact with all their educators to track the learners’ progress. Francis was also issued with a note by the department, permitting him to work with learners in the Pinetown District with behavioural problems in an effort to get them back in school. He said over the weekend he received a message from a parent facing a challenge of having to pay the full school fees for 2022 amounting to R1 800 in cash for their child to be accepted by the school, if unable to pay the child will not be registered.
“The pandemic has been hard on everyone, in some families both parents aren’t working and there’s no source of income in the home and our very own schools in our communities are denying our children a right to education because their parents don’t have enrolment money. So now our youth must stay at home and mustn’t attend school because both their parents are unemployed and don’t have money to enrol them. This is why our youth turn to becoming drug dealers, runners, crime, substance abuse and also our young girls going into relationships with sugar daddies or
