Thousands still out in the cold
12 ‘EMERGENCY’ SCHOOLS TO BE BUILT LESUFI Schools feared ‘racist’ label
THE Gauteng department of education is building 12 emergency schools, as it battles to place more than 19 000 pupils in grades 1 and 8.
MEC of education Panyaza Lesufi said yesterday the department had drastically reduced the list of pupils who were not in class at the start of the academic calendar last week from 58 000 to 7 092. These were pupils who had applied through the online application system.
However, Lesufi said it was unfortunate that the department had since received 12 821 new applications through walk-ins in the past week. He said 7 820 of the new applications were for Grade 1 and 5 001 for Grade 8. This brings the number of pupils who have not been allocated a school to 19 913.
Lesufi said building the new schools would ensure pupils were placed in schools as swiftly as possible so that the academic process could continue.
Head of department Edward Mosuwe said they had already appointed contractors to build the alternative construction technology schools, signed their contracts and given them letters of appointment. By Monday the contractors would be on site and starting to work.
“Our estimation is that maybe in the next three months we should have those schools up and running. It is our assumption that the contractors have all the materials, but they have given us a guarantee that they have those materials.”
He said the priority was to make sure that pupils are in class.
“An average cost of alternative construction school is in the region of R35-million, it’s a lot of money.”
Mosuwe said most of the schools would be primary schools, built in areas such as Palm Ridge, Birch Acres, Gauteng East, Protea Glen, Zandspruit, Centurion, Sedibeng East and Hammanskral.
Lesufi said the department was experiencing high admission pressure in areas such as Palm Ridge, Birch Acres and Centurion.
Lesufi said the department was also planning to open eight new brick-and-mortar schools this month, build 603 additional alternative construction technology classrooms and also build 314 Grade R classrooms and 160 toilet blocks to address the pressure.
He said it also had to persuade some schools to take extra pupils.
It also relocated 74 alternative construction technology schools to high pressure areas to alleviate overcrowding.
“That is the reason why we have managed to reduce the numbers to what we can say is still unacceptable levels.
“Those parents that still have children at home we want to assure them that our centres are working extremely hard to reduce these numbers. We are quite convinced the remaining 7 092 will be placed within the remaining days.”
He said it might take longer for the new applications, but pupils would be placed eventually. TWO Pretoria Afrikaans high schools that refused to admit more English speakers feared they would be labelled “racist” if they disciplined black pupils.
This was said by Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi at a media briefing yesterday.
Hoërskool Overkruin and Hoërskool Montana took the department to court last week to prevent it placing more English-speaking learners at the schools because they “did not have enough resources”.
Lesufi said the schools feared that if they punish black learners, they are seen as racist, so they don’t want to take more learners because it might create an environment where they have to have two sets of rules and discipline is the foundation of their schools.
He said he had had “marathon meetings” with the school governing bodies who had raised concerns about admissions in the area. He said Overkruin would now have two English classrooms to accommodate 70 pupils and Montana would have 47 English-speaking pupils.