Wedad Sarhan enrolled her son in Al Taqwa, a villa school in Sharjah, but when it closed last year 10-year-old Malik, who has Down syndrome, had nowhere to go. A year later, he is still being taught at home. Most schools refuse to admit Malik. The others demand exorbitant fees that Mrs Sarhan says are outrageous. "Out of all the schools, the lowest they asked for was Dh40,000 (US$11,000) a year, and those were the schools that didn't turn us away from the start," said Mrs Sarhan. "Some of them, as soon as I started talking, would immediately refuse. 'No, no, we don't take these cases', they would say."
Mrs Sarhan, a Jordanian housewife and a member of the UAE Down Syndrome Association, even got into the habit of taking a copy of the 2006 Disability Rights Act with her to try to persuade schools to accept her son. She would have to pay Dh35,000 to enrol him in a special needs centre - a prospect she does not favour because she wants him to mix with pupils his own age. But higher fees are a grim prospect facing parents of children with special needs under the new policy.
Mrs Sarhan, a mother of four, also worries about the isolation Malik faces at home. Nancy al Masood, a special-needs nurse whose son has mild autism, said integration was a step in the right direction, but parents should not have to foot the bill. "This is just saying 'unless you're rich don't come'," she said. Mrs al Masood's son is nearing graduation from the American International School-Abu Dhabi. She has paid tens of thousands of dirhams during the past decade for a shadow teacher so that her son could attend a regular school.
Part of the problem, she said, was that children did not leave centres with an academic diploma. Mrs al Masood's son, Hashim, functions at a high level, and will graduate from high school with a 3.0 average. "You have 18-year-olds beading bracelets in the centres. What good is that?" she said. While Mrs al Masood supports the new policy in theory, she said it would be a difficult transition for public and private schools. "The society here, they just don't embrace special-needs kids," she said, recalling her own experience when her son started school. "When Hashim first came they said, 'I don't want that retarded kid sitting next to my kid in class. He might catch something'."
Mrs al Masood criticised the ministry for not addressing the shortage of spaces in Abu Dhabi centres. * The National
