Iona Napier
THE enraged parents of an autistic girl who was excluded at school are taking her elsewhere after her classmates’ parents united against her.
Parents of the girl’s 20 classmates at Colegio Gregorio Maranon de la Cala del Moral decided not to take their children to school in three consecutive days of protest.
They were objecting to the alleged ‘daily aggressive and insulting behaviour’ of the nine-year-old child who had been attending the Rincon de la Victoria primary school for three years.
The Lopez-Reduella family compared the ‘discrimination, exclusion and segregation’ suffered by their daughter to apartheid times in a press conference on March 26.
They described her as ‘a girl, like any other, who wanted to enjoy and share in school life.’
Their spokesperson said: “The most important thing here is the health and well-being of the child, and because the hostile environment of the school does not cater to her special educational needs, they will be looking for a different school.”
The family had been campaigning for more educational support for their daughter for five years ‘without response’ and she had recently been assigned monitor who was not sufficiently trained to care for autism sufferers to ‘contain her’.
A spokesperson for discrimination charity Solcom said: “If this had happened to any other child without a disability it could be called bullying.”
