School fees and associated costs cause some to slip through the cracks

It is a tale of two cities, side by side.

The parents of teens are in celebratory mood because their children have risen above the challenges of secondary schooling and tertiary education lies before them.

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The celebration is for the wins, the increased pass rates and in some households, the passes some families are celebrating for the very first time in generational history.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is sullenness and crippling anxiety. It is in this space that poverty overtakes excitement and the cost of uniforms knocks on the door.

The daily problem of putting food in lunchboxes when the feeding scheme can no longer carry on.

Where the arm of donors can no longer reach, barely breathing parents are struggling to take over.

This is the story of many mothers, even fathers, who struggle through the great depression that is the South African economy, coupled with an unresponsive coparent who simply opts out because the finances associated with parenting a school-going child are far too inconvenient to deal with.

As a social media addict, I have noted that many mothers have opted to keep their children out of school, not out of choice, but because of insufficient funds and the motherly instinct to prevent their child being the odd one out.

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Most of these mothers have paced through maintenance courts, pleading and begging. Yet they are still left wanting.

The justice system is pragmatic on paper, but abusive in reality. In these courts, applicants are stripped of their dignity as their needs are reduced to just above the poverty line.

Mothers stand before strangers to explain their children’s needs, begging another to do the right thing!

So, while the government celebrates the pupils who rose to the peak in secondary schooling, they ought to be reminded that the ones who fell through the cracks didn’t just fall through academic cracks, but also through financial cracks as a result of a broken maintenance system!

Let their plight be remembered. The broken systems affects children.

The government does not speak of this. Yet, these laws fail because of the ethics level of those government employees who are meant to implement them.