28129289 Marthe Kotze

Note; the school where Marthe did her photography practical and the school on which she wrote the article is not the same.

Transport to Tshegofatsong

For the children of Tshegofatsong Special School everything is more difficult than for most other children. Tshegofatsong is the only school for children with special needs in the whole Mamelodi, and this makes transport especially difficult. The schools 220 pupils are mentally disabled and most of them need constant supervision. However these children often have to travel to and from school alone.

Paulina Magagula, head of the senior department of the school, says the pupils used to be transported by the school’s bus. However this was stopped in 1998 because it became impossible to fetch all the children with just one bus. According to Magagula the fact that Tshegofatsong is the only special-needs school in Mamelodi means that pupils come from all over Mamelodi. Also the size of the school has increased so that the school’s current bus is too small for all the children who need transport. The parents are now responsible for getting their children to school. Some of the families arrange for group transport, and after school you can see as many as five children cramming into the back seat of a single car on their way home.

Some of the children travel as far as 20km to and from school every day, which means they have to leave home at 5:30am every morning to be at school on time. Magagula says the teachers check whether all the children are picked up or get on taxis after school closes. Nonetheless, she says children sometimes get left at school. She herself has often been forced to take a pupil to her own home for the night because no one came to pick them up. “The next day we just take the child back to school and hope someone comes to take them home that afternoon.”

According to Magagula many of the children live with foster parents, and the majority of these foster parents are unemployed. She says that most of them are therefore dependent on the disability grant which the children receive each month. According to Ntabiseng Mashiloane, from the department of Social Development, a disability grant is R1080 per month. School principal Emily Mokishe says that many families spend most of this amount on taxi fares to get the children to school. “I really don’t know how some of them survive.” she says.

According to Mokishe the school requested an 80-seater bus in the service plan they handed to the Department of Education in November last year. Instead they received a 14-seater bus, a 1.4 litre bakkie and addition funds to hire another teacher. Mokishe says that finding funds is difficult, and the school tries to do its best with its limited resources. She says the school has reapplied for a grant in order to buy a new bus, and they are also trying to collect funds from other sources.

Mokishe says that although the taxi drivers help look after the children they transport, it is not safe for these children to be travelling unsupervised. “These are not normal children, they are vulnerable and need special care. We try to look after them and teach them to take care of themselves, but when they leave we can only hope they are safe and come back the next day.”