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Girl who lost out in party donation fiasco
Thursday, 06 November 2008
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IN THE MIDDLE: Amina and daughter Hanan Yusuf could have benefited from a NZ First donation.
Amina Yusuf has never heard of NZ First leader Winston Peters but, if a charity had accepted the party's offer of a $10,000 donation, the money was earmarked to help her family.
The sum was part of the $158,000 the party was ordered to pay back by the auditor-general after it was spent illegally on electioneering in 2005.
The Somali solo mother of five is assisted by the Autism Intervention Trust, which rejected the donation, deciding the money was not NZ First's to give.
The fallout over the illegal spending is a world away from Berhampore School, where Ms Yusuf was picking up Hanan, her eight-year-old severely autistic daughter, this week. The party gave the money to charities instead. "And she will eat anything, even the rubbish.
"The biggest problem I have got is that she keeps running away," she said through an interpreter, while Hanan ran around the room and banged the walls. "She's the oldest child."
Raising Hanan is made even tougher because she has four other young children."
The Autism Intervention Trust had let Hanan attend a holiday programme, and helped the family move out of its Housing New Zealand accommodation. She's the one who is supposed to help. "She often causes damage to the houses she's in .
Berhampore School principal Mark Potter said Hanan needed constant one-on-one care and could not speak or understand speech.. ."
If the charity had accepted the money, it could have given Hanan after-school care, he said. but she's got a gentle spirit.
Trust spokeswoman Prue Payne said no new offers of funding had been received.
Ms Yusuf moved to New Zealand eight years ago, a few months after Hanan was born in Kenya.
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Many students bored in class
– Tuesday, 28 October 2008
More than half of 14-year-old Kiwi schoolchildren are often bored in class, a new survey shows.
Schools are so interested in the new figures they are buying reports to compare how engaged their students are compared with the rest of the country.
The New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) survey of about 8500 students from more than 50 schools was released in the Seeing Yourself in Science report issued late last week.
A scale measured student attitudes to school.
It shows students lose interest in school as each year passes from Year 7 to Year 10. By Year 10, both boys and girls dropped to 53. . A score of 55 was the level at which students said they were often bored in class.
The report says there is an emerging trend for disengagement with science learning in Year 7 and 8 students.
"If you had anybody scoring down around 20 at the bottom of the scale, you would have to say that they would be very sad students who probably had some things going on in their lives that were nothing to do with school at all," said Rose Hipkins, a NZCER chief researcher and co-author of the report.
Students who left school at 16 had started disengaging in early primary years. Disengagement from science sat within a general trend to disengagement from school.
Hipkins said that while the number of students reporting boredom was a concern, there were also positive sentiments expressed by the same students.
"At 12, the young people who left school by 16 were giving up, playing up and increasingly alienated, and this trend was even more marked at age 14," the report says. A score of 55 included sentiments that their culture was treated with respect, they were proud to be at the school and their classes were not a waste of time. A score of 55 included sentiments that their culture was treated with respect, they were proud to be at the school and their classes were not a waste of time.
"They can get the data for their own individual school and see it compared to the national pattern, so they can get a snapshot of how their students are compared to students nationally," Hipkins said.
Schools were able, for the first time, to buy data about the attitudes of their students.
"They've got hugely more choices than we had.
The report highlights the need for a continued shift in curriculum and teaching methods to respond to the more individualistic "late-modern youth".
"They have a level of flexibility that simply wasn't available to us as a result of the way society was organised. They're used to everything being personalised and individualised for them," Hipkins said."