Sue Blaine

Education Correspondent

THE ribbon was cut on a R500000 revamping of the Johannesburg Hospital School for children with long-term illnesses yesterday.

The school allows children undergoing long-term treatment such as chemotherapy and kidney dialysis to keep up with their school work. Its first matriculant passed two years ago, said hospital CE Saggie Pillay.

The hospital had an 80% success rate with child cancer patients and almost all of the children who were able to have a kidney transplant “make it”, said the school’s principal, Ronel van Biljon.

“There are children that pass away, and that’s hard, but we (the 15 teachers) are positive people and that sustains us through the bad times,” she said.

Without the hospital’s school the children would have to go to a nearby community school and would still miss out on schooling because they had to undergo long periods of treatment, said Pillay.

The renovation was sponsored by medical aid company MedScheme, which has made the school its flagship corporate social investment (CSI) project because it neatly marries health and education, the two prongs of the company’s CSI, said MedScheme executive director and CSI chairwoman Yvonne Motsisi.

The renovations were done at the grade 12 school on the Johannesburg Hospital premises, but MedScheme was looking at ways of helping the school’s creche division, which educates the visually impaired and autistic children at a separate premises in Parktown.

Children have been taught at Johannesburg Hospital since 1923 when volunteer teachers visited the sick in their wards. In 1960 the school was taken over by education officials who appointed teachers.

In 1992 the school’s numbers had dwindled because the former Transvaal education department would not allow teachers to register black children, so the school deregistered and reregistered with the former education and training department. “It closed in July (1992) and opened in August that year. That’s when I started as a teacher,” Van Biljon said.

The school teaches about 190 pupils and used to cram them into one classroom, but the renovations began last March and there are now more classrooms.

“I’ve been here 16 years and this is the first time we can operate as a proper school. We have a bell ringing,” Van Biljon said.

Source: Business Day