Prisoners roped in to fix school loo problem
Will get training to paint, clean and fix desks
PRISONERS, who last month were said to have better access to toilets than pupils at 30 percent of Gauteng high schools, will now be roped in to help the provincial Department of Education fix its school sanitation problems.
During his Budget vote speech yesterday, Gauteng MEC for Education Panyaza Lesufi said an agreement with the Department of Correctional Services would be concluded to “make prisoners available to clean the toilets in all our public schools”.
Lesufi said the move would assist with sanitation and resolve most of the problems at more than 500 public schools in the province.
“Correctional Services has committed that some of the prisoners are trained to fix broken toilets and desks, and to paint some of our schools and leave them in a condition that will assist our pupils,” he said.
“We have identified 50 schools, mostly on the West Rand, that have the worst sanitation and during the holidays these will be demolished and rebuilt so we don’t have this problem of poor sanitation.”
The agreement to use prisoners to assist with meeting the new norms and standards on school infrastructure was signed with the National Department of Basic Education, according to Lesufi.
Last month, lobby group Equal Education released a schools audit conducted at more than 200 schools between February and April, showing that in about 30 percent of Gauteng schools, more than 100 pupils share a single working toilet.
Research by the Wits Justice Project in 2013 showed that 65 men in the overcrowded Johannesburg Medium A Prison shared one toilet.
It also showed that when pupils are able to access toilets, the conditions are not good.
Nearly 70 percent of pupils don’t have soap in their schools, while more than 40 percent don’t have access to toilet paper. Other findings were:
At least 70 percent of schools don’t have a functional library.
All schools have access to water and 98 percent have access to electricity.
At least 97 percent of all schools have a nutrition centre.
About 80 percent of schools have a shortage of either desks or chairs.
Half the schools have classrooms with a hole in the ceiling or floor, and 20 percent of schools have more than five broken windows.
About 40 percent of schools are considered usually unsafe or only sometimes safe because they don’t have either an adequate fence or sufficient security guards.
Lesufi said yesterday that the department would be spending R50 million on a replacement of toilets programme for the “50 high risk schools”.
Last year, the Gauteng Department of Education said it would spend R100 million on emergency repairs to toilets in more than 576 schools.
Yesterday, Lesufi said while in most schools toilets were rehabilitated to the standards required, the department experienced poor quality work by some contractors.
“We have 576 schools audited with poor sanitation, so we know where the problems are. Those that need either painting or fixing of a tap, that is an ongoing thing,” he said. “You go to a school, you find there are chairs broken so we want prisoners to fix them. If a fence is broken, they will fix it. It’s a category of services that Correctional Services is willing to provide us.”
With regards to working with prisoners, the MEC said: “They have to check them as to what kind of prisoners they are, but I am quite hopeful that come the end of July we will have an agreement in place.”