Students from poor family skip school to care for sibling
Nine-year-old Sangita Pun spends her days looking after her younger brother when her parents leave for work every day. The third-grader is forced to skip school when none of her parents is around to take care of her brother.
"Seeing all my friends go to school to study, I feel very envious. But I have to stay back when parents are not at home to look after my younger brother," said Sangita of Khaganekot VDC in Jajarkot district. "Sometimes I attend classes carrying him on my back," she added.
But it is not possible for her to take her brother along every day, so she frequently misses the classes.
Sangita's parents, who are peasants, toil hard day and night just to manage two square meals a day for the family.
Her classmate Radhika Shahi spoke of similar dilemma. "With my little brother trying to sleep on my lap, it gets difficult even to hold the book," she said.
Nanda Shahi, a teacher at their school, said many of her students skip school regularly to tend to household chores. "The number of such students is growing," said Shahi.
"Economically backward parents engage their children on household activities so that they can go to work," she added.
According to her, villagers' ignorance about the importance of education is also one of the reasons why children stay away from schools.
Meanwhile, Purna Bahadur Chanara of Manmayi village, a second-grader at Lekbesi Primary School, has to miss school for entirely different reason.
Although he is not required to take care of his family members, he is usually busy chasing monkeys away from his fields.
Both his parents are laborers. His father, Kali Bahadur Chanara, said, "We are struggling to make ends meet. If we send our son to school, there would be nobody to take care of our crops."
According to District Education Office, Jajarkot, the district has 94,000 children, as per Census 2011, and a dropout rate of 5 percent.
Chief Education Officer Bishnu Narayan Shrestha said that although family problems have imperiled children's attendance at school, such students are few in number.
On the other hand, civil society and other non-governmental organizations report about 20 percent of the total students in the district remain out of schools.
Published on: 8 September 2015 | Republica
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