I always preach this to the boys yet it is still a hard pill for me to swallow. Especially when it comes to my children and I try to do things in the best interest of their future. We applied at a school on the 5th March 2014. I sat outside the school at 5 30am on the morning of the 3rd March to collect the application form and then again on the 5th March to hand in the application form. The school website states that they adhere to National Policy for admissions and after researching what exactly that meant I decided to make the sacrifice to try to ensure we stood a good chance of getting in. When we read through the application form we were a tad disheartened, we didn’t understand of what relevance mine or Zaid’s social and academic achievements were to Anees’s acceptance at the school. I was the first to hand in the application form and then the waiting game began.
On the 2nd June 2014 we received a letter from the school to say that they could not find a place for Anees. I couldn’t understand this when I knew for a fact that kids that don’t reside close to the school and who didn’t have any connection via family ties to the school had been accepted. I promptly requested a meeting with the lady in charge of admissions and she was quite blasé about my request and referred me to the principal. I e-mailed him requesting to see a copy of the admissions policy as I was never informed that it differed to what was advertised on the website. To this day I am yet to see this admissions policy! I am gobsmacked that there is no transparency with regard to this school’s admission process. I have e-mailed the Department of Education and been in contact with lawyers at NGO’s who say that we are being treated unfairly after they had seen the correspondence that I had sent to the school. They have even sent letters to the school and the school has not responded to them either. The next step should have been litigation but the NGO doesn’t have the capacity to take on more litigious matters and we don’t have the money to hire an attorney.
This has been weighing on me since the 2nd June but I have not said anything about it because I was hopeful. I’ve reached a point where I find there is no more hope and I am just disappointed and hurt that the school did not have the common decency to be upfront from the start about their selection criteria.
I needed to blog this so that I can let go of it. Yes life isn’t fair and you will not be treated fairly sometimes. It seems that even institutions such as schools that pride themselves on being fair to all and advocate respect for others don’t always behave as we would like to think they should.
From Nasima, with love 