To all friends ... old and new. Please support the Leigh Davids Fundraising Initiative by attending the Bingo Fundraiser on 13th December 2014. For those wanting to know who Leigh Davids is and the reason for the fundraiser .... (she is also the daughter of my nephew-in-law :) ) what follows below is a post from her mom, Bernadette Davids: First of all to those who have not had the good fortune of meeting my daughter. Here is the link of an interview in May this year: youtube/embed/2dYz6Yu4hN8 Now you know who Leigh is. She is not blind but simply partially sighted. As a parent who is forward thinking I am aware of what the future might possibly hold for her; so in holding all that in mind, Leigh is already learning Braille and myself and my husband are too. I am also fund raising so that I can get her the portable Braille computer so that it can aid in her schooling. So I beg to differ; I am able to step away and take a practical approach to Leigh’s school career and not just take the parental emotional approach. Leigh has attended LOFOB ( The League of Friends of the Blind) pre-school since she was 2 years old. They have started teaching her, my husband and I, Braille. They have even committed to following this through till when she is fully literate; this service being offered to my family till we are all fully competent. Do you know how great it feels that Leigh is able to tell me that :. is the letter H ? In the highlighted part in your email below you have said that should she master Braille we can look at preparing a Full Service school for her. She will be fully literate soon. So can that school please be advised that she needs to attend from next year for Grade R? My concern and big worry is that as the Department of Education we are willing to ‘box ‘ her according to how they think will best suit her. She is being ‘boxed’ by what is considered a disability. Why can I not be the best judge of that? The reason that I have been struggling to get to even know of which schools could possibly accommodate her was that when calling I could find not one person who could help with my query. That’s a concern. We talk about the concept of Full Service schools yet that seems to be low down on our list of priorities. LOFOB has even offered to support the school and teachers or teacher aids around Leigh’s integration. This would be at a cost of thousands yet they have freely offered this to us. Should Leigh’s eyesight deteriorate any further and I need to then send her to a school that would accommodate her, the option that I would choose would be Pioneer School for the Blind. It concerns me that this has not been offered as an option. To the additional recipients on this list; please have a read on the below: Let me tell you about an experience we had on Sunday at our local Spur: At the end of our lunch we fetched Leigh from the play area. When we stepped into that section, the child minder was busy chastising a girl of about 8 or 9 years old. I did not know what this was about. Later, when we were walking to our car, my husband then said that he had chatted to the child minder around what was going on. This girl and friends had been making fun of my daughter the whole time that we were in Spur. They had called her ‘blind face’. When I chatted with Leigh outside she said that she had told them that she was not blind. This has not been the first experience for us as a family of this kind and it probably won’t be the last. If we do not allow our kids the opportunity to face those challenges and deal with them, then we are disabling them in how to manage other things in their lives. Kids who then do not have any disabilities will continue to view differently abled kids with that same negative teasing attitude simply because we have chosen the easy way out; create a school away from mainstream and it’s easier to manage ‘the problem’. I’m sorry but I do not accept that Athlone school is the only option available to my daughter. Thanks for responding to my email. Regards,
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 14:07:14 +0000
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