No Sir, school is hardly the place for pregnant teens

Sample this: “School is important but it can wait,” read a Cutting Edge item, titled, ‘Expectant pupils’ published last Thursday. In it, Job Momanyi rejected the directive to force expectant pupils and mothers back to class.

Describing the directive as ‘insensitive’ and ‘inhuman’, he said: “These children are traumatised and physically not in the right frame. Their babies also need to be breastfed and cared for…,” he said, criticising the order requiring chiefs and their assistants to smoke out and return to school pregnant or nursing schoolgirls.

Momanyi’s exhortations fell on deaf ears. For, only yesterday, this paper dedicated the back page to a story titled: ‘Special facilities for teen mums in schools’. And as if to mock Momanyi and experts who have recently expressed their reservations at the hasty return of these hapless teen mums to school, the blurb to yesterday’s story said schools were building special bathrooms and offering meals to lure girls back to school.

In a December 31 article by yours truly, titled: “Show care and compassion to pregnant schoolgirls”, clinical psychologist Gladys Mwiti said: “Let these children be taken care of.” In her opinion, the return-to-school order was more about the government’s 100 per cent transition policy and less about pregnant schoolgirls’ welfare.

On closer scrutiny, and despite its screaming headline, yesterday’s article appears to vindicate experts’ opinion — that school is hardly the place for a pregnant woman, with a principal quoted as saying: “The parents and guardians have been advised that once their daughters give birth, they would be expected to rent houses for them outside the school compound.”  Schools are not prepared for them, it seems.

From sex pests to saviours

The challenges and implications of readmitting pregnant and nursing pupils vis-à-vis the 100 per cent transition policy are legion and can’t be wished away, well-meaning though it is. And then the draconian measures to readmit pregnant pupils — including mobilising the heavy-handed chiefs and their assistants to ensure compliance with directive — are based on the fallacy that classroom equates to learning.

Under Common Law — which many mainline Christian denominations operate under — and notwithstanding the current 18-year legal definition of an adult, seven years is defined as the age of reason, when a child should be able to tell right from wrong. There is, therefore, the need to interrogate the narrative that all pregnant schoolgirls were raped and shouldn’t be punished for the sins of their molesters.

The truth is that most children, thanks to overexposure to TV and social media, know about ‘bad manners’ — their euphemism for sex. If we, as parents, spend time with our children, we shall quickly learn from them or their siblings how much they know about sex, and accordingly, teach them to sound the alarm at the first sign of sexual abuse.

Covid-19 pandemic

During the nine-month closure of schools in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, our lowest moment as parents must have been the constant whines that schools should reopen quickly for children to be in teachers’ protective care. Teachers who have all along been cast as sex pests are now seen as saviours!

I put it to the education authorities that placing the load of pregnant and nursing pupils on teachers’ shoulders is exonerating us parents from our duty as our children’s primary educators.

To keep our pregnant and nursing daughters at home will serve multiple functions. One, it will give parents a chance to reclaim their lost parenthood, which, it seems, they’re hell-bent to shove at tutors.

Teachers, especially at this moment when they’re working on a crash programme to squeeze a three-year syllabus into two, will be too overworked to take on the additional load of caring for pupils in maternity situations.

Could the Education ministry please sit down with teachers who have to arbitrate when pupils snigger at and taunt their pregnant classmates... as in when morning sickness strikes; gynaecologists who know what it means to be young and pregnant; and paediatricians who know the value of mother-child bonding, which cannot be achieved at school?

Let them discuss with nutritionists a balanced diet for pregnant pupils and their unborn children... Let all the stakeholders thrash out realistic solutions to the schoolgirl pregnancy debacle.

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