A four-year-old boy has been expelled from a Dubai school after just two days of granted admission due to “behavioral incapacities,” the Gulf News reported on Wednesday.
The decision to cast out the child from the school’s summer class program at the United International Private School (UIPS) in the emirate was met with outrage from the parents, arguing their son had been discriminated against.
The school claimed the child needed special care, something they could not provide him with.
“He is not really recommended for the mainstream classes because of the behavioral incapacities of the child,” UIPS Principal Dr. Eunice Orzame told Gulf News.
“And much to our desire to accept him, we do not have the special facilities for special children. And we have plans in the future to put up these special education classes, but we have to be prepared, get ready with a special education teacher,” Orzame added.
The school’s guidance counselor, Nerrissa Villacete, explained that the child would do nothing but roam around the classroom, disrupting other children’s learning because the teacher would focus only on him.
Although admitting his son has a short attention span and gets bored easily, the child’s father, Rommel Liwanag, said: “We really feel that they have discriminated against our son because I do not think that you can judge a child’s learning capacity in just two days of being with him.”
UIPS was recently given a rating of “Acceptable” in the latest school inspection report, published in May 2012 by the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA). It was also recommended to UIPS to “develop provision for special educational needs including a review of the admissions policy and diagnostic processes.”
Mohammad Darwish, chief of Regulation and Compliance Commission at the KHDA, has previously spoken about school expulsion.
"A school may permanently remove a student from its rolls for disciplinary reasons such as crime, dishonesty, act of dishonor, damage to school property, regular or continued absence from school or if the student exceeds the maximum school-going age," Darwish said in 2011.
But according to the report, the child in question was not accused of such reasons.
By law, the government of Dubai stipulates that a school is not permitted to suspend or expel students without authorization from KHDA.
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