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Visually impaired children encouraged to enroll children at relevant schools

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Khanyisa School for the Blind in Port Elizabeth is calling on parents with visually impaired children to enroll children to relevant schools.

This as the school continues to experience a decrease in the number of Grade 1 learners that register each year. Only four pupils have been registered to start their grade one at the school this year.

Principal, Bongiwe Daniels says teachers in schools like Khanyisa have been trained to upskill visually impaired kids, with the necessary equipment available. She says parents who refuse to accept their children’s disabilities only delay them.

“Sometimes parents find it difficult to accept that their children have visual impairment and then they would allow them to go to the mainstreaming for quite some time. The child will be labelled sometimes as someone who could not do the work. But I would advise parents to, when they notice that their children come very close to the TV, and then you need to take that child to the doctor,” says Daniels.

Grade 1 teacher at the Khanyisa, Noluthando Manqunyana, says learners at the school draw motivation from knowing that blindness does not limit their capabilities. She lost her sight to diabetes over ten years ago. Manqunyana says children need to be in an environment with people they can relate to.

“It makes them to understand that life can go on, and you can be someone at the end because there also people who are blind, there is also a teacher that is blind who is a teacher now. So they may be anything they want to be,” says Manqunyana.

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