Abolish boarding schools for children under 12

Hello, my name is Victoria Elaine. When I was 8 years old, I was admitted to a boarding school in rural Kenya. The next 4 years were cold, lonely and deeply challenging. Boarding schools as an institution are not all bad, but the resources necessary to nurture children, to ensure that their childhood experience is not robbed and instead replaced by the necessities of looking after oneself are far too lacking to have children under 12 in most of our institutions. Parenting is a difficult job but it is also a paramount part of childhood development. The school terms in this country ensure that these children only spend 3 months of the year with their parents. This leaves almost no time to bond with these kids resulting in passive adults who have almost no societal skills because the only people they had to socialize with were their peers.
After 4 years at this said school, that has since been shut down, I was able to leave. On the last term of my schooling there, two young girls were admitted to the boarding school program. They were barely 6. I remember feeling elated that I was finally free but still my heart was broken for those girls. I knew the path they would be forced to walk for I had walked it myself. If it wasn’t the terribly cold weather(the school was located at the slopes of a mountain), it was the heavy metallic buckets we would be forced to carry to fetch water from the river incase there was no water at the school. I could not help those girls then but I believe with your help and with the assistance of the necessary government interventions we can achieve this seemingly small legislation to bring equity to our education system and save the childhood of so many children in this country. Please join me by signing this petition. Thank you