Make our schools safe, demand frustrated pupils

Last week Equal Education (EE) was in Parliament presenting its report on the state of education from 2014 to 2019. The report found that there has been “declining funding commitments to school infrastructure and a substantial failure to implement binding legislative norms and standards over the past five years”.

“In addition, the report notes with concern the need for the courts to direct government to carry out its constitutional obligations. Over the period under review, the failure to ensure effective provisioning of school infrastructure resulted in various litigious challenges, with the courts ultimately ordering government to improve legal frameworks and ensure infrastructure delivery,” reads the report.

Also last week, Equal Education was in court with the KZN Education Department over the scholar transport policy. The department and EE signed a consent order agreeing on when the draft policy will be published for comment. EE has been campaigning for better scholar transport in the province since 2014.

In Parliament, EE told the Portfolio Committee on Basic Education that the department had failed to prioritise and provide learner transport, which led to the learner transport programme being underfunded.

On Friday 25 October 2019, about 80 high school learners sang and marched from Hanover Street to the Western Cape Provincial Legislature in the rain with the intention of highlighting the disparities between schools in townships and Model C schools, said Grade 11 pupil Nathi Dike from Khayelitsha.

Equal Education marches for safer schools to the Provinical Legislature on 25 October 2019. Photo: Karabo Mafolo

“The school I go to is in bad condition. It’s not a good environment to learn in, but since we’re poor there’s not much we can do. Most of the windows are broken. It’s been like that since I got there in Grade 8 and now I’m in Grade 11 and nothing’s changed,” Dike told Daily Maverick.

Equal Education stopped at the legislature’s steps to hand over a memorandum. The provincial minister for the Western Cape Education Department (WCED), Debbie Schafer, was not available to accept the memorandum and Sigamoney Naicker from the department accepted it on Schafer’s behalf.

Representatives from the Department of Community Safety and from Premier Alan Winde’s office were also present.

The memorandum’s demands included that, “The WCED must ensure that every school has established a school safety committee by the start of the 2020 academic year”, and that “inter-departmental committees leading government’s response to school violence must be transparent and allow for engagement with movements such as EE”.

The other half of the demands were addressed to SAPS. EE demanded that “The Collaborative Protocol between the Department of Basic Education and SAPS must be amended to explicitly note and require that all police officers who interact with schools, receive specialised training in dealing with school violence.”

Bronagh Hammond, the WCED’s spokesperson, said the department is “committed to ensuring quality education for every learner, in every classroom, in every school across the Western Cape. A safe learning environment is a critical requirement for quality teaching and learning to take place.”

Sisonke Makhikhi, a Grade 11 pupil, said he didn’t feel safe at school because of the infrastructure.

“The fencing around the school isn’t proper, it’s easy for people to gain access to the premises and steal from the school,” Makhikhi told Daily Maverick.

In 2015, EE undertook a social audit which found that one in six learners felt unsafe at school. Forty-two percent of the school fences surveyed had gaps and holes in them. More than half of the schools surveyed lacked a full-time security guard.

Hammond said the WCED had brought school resource officers into schools to help pupils feel safer. This initiative was started in 2013 and is based on best practice in the US, said Hammond.

“The presence of school resource officers (SROs) assists to alleviate the struggles faced by the department in dealing with school violence, particularly where there is a high rate of gangsterism. We have 53 schools involved, with 136 school resource officers. The role these officers play in our schools is absolutely significant,” said Hammond.

In the 2015 social audit, EE wrote that WCED needs to stop treating issues of violence or broken windows as though they are isolated incidents.

“It is not incompetent principals failing to maintain their fences, it is a system in which half of the schools lack the resources to properly secure the school premises,” reads the social audit report. DM