John Bisseker still battling vandals

Despite a lack of electricity, dysfunctional toilets and a doublestorey building on the verge of collapse, the pupils of East London’s John Bisseker Secondary School were among thousands of Eastern Cape youngsters to start the 2022 academic year on Wednesday.

Hundreds of schools in the province face similar and even worse infrastructure challenges that the department previously said needed more than R1bn to fix.

John Bisseker is also unfenced, there is no running water in the toilets, and only a section of the administration block has electricity.

The Parkside school has been vandalised over the years, with criminals stripping its electricity cabling and water pipes.

The school governing body and parents said these were longstanding issues that had been reported to the department, which only gave empty promises.

SGB chair Ruben Sylvester said criminals had easy access to the premises, which was vandalised again in the December holidays.

“During the December break thugs broke into several classrooms and stole electric wires, plug sockets and other components. “There’s hardly any fencing. “The school has been without a fence for more than five years. The department promised to provide one, but this has not been done.”

When the Dispatch visited the school on Monday, criminals had made a hole in a wall to gain access to electric cables in a classroom.

Hardboard partitions that separate several classrooms are not properly fixed, so pupils can see and hear what is going on next door.

Provincial education spokesperson Malibongwe Mtima said officials from the department would meet parents and the school management on Tuesday to discuss the issues affecting the school.

“The intention of the meeting is to resolve all the issues raised and to update them on the progress.”

Some senior staffers at the school, who did not want to be named, said the toilets and water situation was another issue the department had ignored.

Schalk van der Sandt, the founder of Friends of Schalk, threatened that if the education department did not meet them to discuss issues at the school, they would shut it down.

Parent Thembile Matini said the department did nothing about the situation at the school because it was in a coloured area. He said while the issues were urgent, he did not support shutting down the school.