Last week, social media lit up with rage after one purported news page posted that an 11-year-old boy had been sent home from school after he couldn't pay 4 dollars and 50 cents for Children's Day. By the end of the day, the Ministry had issued a press release clarifying that their investigation had revealed that the story posted on social media was not true.
Over the weekend, the child's grandfather said that it was some students who told the child he wasn't allowed to be at school.
Today we asked Fonseca what the real story was.
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"It's a difficult issue because I don't want to violate the privacy of the family but I will say this. We're dealing with a case of a special needs child and other members of the family who are also special needs so the child was not turned away from school because of the inability to pay any fee, that was not the case. The child, as the family, as the legal guardian of the child has reported and made public, so I can speak to that, the child went to school and got into some back and forth with some other student, got frustrated and then left school. And this was not the first time that this has happened, this was not the first time. So we're satisfied, we did the full thorough investigation into the matter. We're absolutely satisfied that in fact that is what happened. That of course is not acceptable, we have to try to address that. We want to ensure that all of our children, especially our children with special needs, that the school environment is welcoming to them, that other students understand and appreciate that they have to treat their fellow students with dignity and humanity. So that's a separate issue but certainly it was not the case, I want to make that very clear, it was not the case that any school or principal or any policy was in place that required this child to pay any money to enter the school, that is absolutely not the case."
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