Stanford’s butterfly children fly high

Writer Elaine Davie

The thing about butterlies is that they seem to celebrate each day with joy, dancing in the air, throwing all caution to the wind, despite their fragile vulnerability. And which of us can pass them by without a smile and a lifting of the heart?

A visit to the Butterly Centre in Stanford has much the same efect. The 12 children, aged between 8 and 14, whose school this is, live life with an uninhibited joie de vivre which is difficult to resist. This, in spite of the learning and life skills challenges each of them has to face and overcome every day. They all live with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), to varying degrees of severity.

The current Butterfly Centre in Stanford with some of the learners and their teachers. They plan to build a bigger and better school on the Stanford Hills Wine Estate.

The Butterly Centre was the brainchild of Jami Kastner of Stanford Hills Wine Estate when she was looking for and failing to find a school which would meet the needs of her young son, Jack, who had been diagnosed with this condition. She was seeking a warm and caring space where the children were understood within their unique context and where each one could be given the opportunity to develop to his or her full potential.

Autistic children have a need for structure, but also the chance to explore their world in a safe and supportive environment. The centre she had in mind would meet all these requirements and, of course, offer easy access to children from Stanford, Gansbaai and even Hermanus. A tough call, but one she was up for.

When the Butterly Centre opened its doors in 2014 in a rented house in Stanford, Jami did not think that there would be more than a handful of children needing its services. To her surprise, it has continued to expand year by year and now there are children on the school’s waiting list. As Jami (now Chairperson of the Butterly Foundation) says, “It has grown out of all proportion to what I envisaged, both in numbers and in scope. Some of our children had never been to school before and some had been struggling to cope within the mainstream education system; actually, I discovered there was very little understanding in the wider community of what ASD was all about.

“That means that we never lose an opportunity of drawing the people of our area into our activities. It’s good for the children, too; they need to socialise and to feel that they are a part of the community. Our annual Sports Day, for instance, which takes place on the Village Green, is attended by many of the town’s people, even if they have no obvious connection to the school. The same is true of the Stanford Stumble, our main fundraising event of the year.”

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