A campaign by a group of students from the Avans in Den Bosch caused outrage on social media on Friday afternoon. They placed waste bins with, among other things, the text: “Dump your child with autism here.” The school has since removed the trash cans and associated posters. “They’ve gone off the rails.”
Students from Avans didn’t know what they saw when they arrived at the school on Friday. Suddenly there were two large trash cans. One for children with ADHD, the other for autism. And then the text: “Can we still make something beautiful out of it.”
Above the bins was a poster with a range of mental illnesses: “ADD, Autism, Dyslexia, Bipolar, ADHD, Dyscalculia, Tourette, Dyspraxi. A lot of money and time wasted. Now dump them at your nearest sorting bin.”
A spokesperson for Avans explains that there is no malicious intent behind the sorting bins. “A number of second-year students of the Communication and Multimedia Design study program conducted research into the social position of people with, for example, autism, ADHD and ADD. With this project they wanted to draw attention to this.”
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In any case, the latter succeeded. “But of course not in the way they would have liked,” the spokesperson admits. “It is now counterproductive and so we would like to offer our sincere apologies to anyone who has been offended by this. The bins were immediately removed this morning.”
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But can these students be blamed? “They have clearly gone wrong here. On the other hand, we are dealing with young students here. They have to develop and be able to make mistakes.” The spokesperson is not yet able to say whether a teacher should have intervened earlier. “We are still investigating exactly how this happened.”
What makes the matter even more painful is that the campaign was supposedly set up by the Waste Service ‘s-Hertogenbosch. “Very annoying,” says the spokesperson for Avans. “The last thing you want is for other parties to be involved in this. We have already contacted them and apologized to them as well.”
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Earlier, the Waste Service itself also announced that it has nothing to do with the trash cans. “Let’s be clear: We were also surprised by this. We have nothing to do with this at all.”
For the students, the failed campaign will probably be a good, but hard lesson. “They find it very annoying and are very shocked.”
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