War on children: playgrounds turn to places of terror
Primary school boy said to have been victim of at least two sex assaults in KZN
A teacher-priest arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a 12-year-old pupil in KwaZulu-Natal.
A Boksburg high school principal receiving oral sex in his office from two pupils and four older women — and filming the antics.
A school counsellor on trial in Pietermaritzburg for raping and sexually assaulting several boys.
And a Johannesburg high school water polo coach charged with rape, sexual assault and attempted murder.
For any parent entrusting the safety and wellbeing of their child to a school and its staff, it’s a litany of allegations that makes for grim reading.
In the first case, the teacher — arrested on Wednesday at his new school after being fired by the school where one of the alleged assaults took place — will make his second court appearance next week.
At Reiger Park No 2 Secondary School in Gauteng, the principal resigned in October and served his last day on January 15.
Now the Gauteng education department wants to rescind his resignation so that he can be fired and prevented from working as a teacher again.
The other two cases are already the subject of high court trials and involve more than 170 allegations against the accused, aged 32 and 22 respectively.
“The department has a zero-tolerance stance on allegations of sexual assault and has never hesitated to act,” said Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi.
● As public outrage mounted this week after sex videos and photographs involving a Gauteng principal went viral, a KwaZulu-Natal teacher was arrested at school for allegedly sexually assaulting a young boy.
The teacher, who is also a well-known priest in Dannhauser in northern KwaZuluNatal, was arrested at a school in Newcastle on Wednesday.
His arrest follows at least two alleged sexual assaults on the boy, the first when he was a 12-year-old pupil at the Dannhauser Primary Full Service School in August 2016.
The other assault is alleged to have taken place in March last year when the boy visited the suspect at his house in Dannhauser.
The school fired the teacher last year but the headmistress declined to say if his dismissal was linked to the sexual assault allegations.
The Sunday Times has learnt that the man subsequently found teaching jobs at a school in Nquthu, outside Dundee, and more recently at the school in Newcastle where he was arrested.
The man’s girlfriend, who is related to the victim’s family, is believed to have informed the boy’s father about the allegations last month.
The teacher appeared briefly in the Dannhauser Magistrate’s Court on Thursday and was remanded in custody. He is expected to apply for bail on February 13.
One of his former colleagues at Dannhauser Primary said this week that staff there had not been aware of the reason for his dismissal.
“There was an investigation going on because of something but we were not told.”
Another staff member said they were informed at a meeting that the teacher, who taught social sciences, had “left”.
Meanwhile, videos and photographs that apparently show Gregory Fisch, the former headmaster of Reiger Park No 2 Secondary School in Boksburg on Gauteng’s East Rand, in compromising positions with a pupil and staff members have split the community.
In the videos and photos, which surfaced about two weeks ago, a man, believed to be Fisch, can be seen with a schoolgirl in her uniform and older women who are performing oral sex on him in his office.
Fisch could not be reached for comment and the acting principal at Reiger Park referred all queries to the provincial department of education.
Musi Kunene, who runs a lift club, said children at the school had no respect for Fisch.
“I think this guy was doing all this and he took the videos and uploaded them to his laptop and they stole the laptop,” Kunene said.
“That’s where these videos came out. They [some of the pupils] knew because some of them were blackmailing him.”
Kunene said he had seen around 17 videos.
A staff member said: “He saw himself as a one-man show who had all the power. He would even threaten to spread lies about teachers.”
In a social media post, Reiger Park community member Marlon McDonald said he did not believe the accusations against Fisch.
Said Duwayne Alexander, who matriculated at the school in 2003: “Before he came, there was a lot of chaos happening at the school but when he started we could see changes that were happening. We couldn’t even think that anything like this would have happened.”
Fisch told some parents that the photos and videos had been altered as part of a smear campaign against him.
Reiger Park resident Mildred Ruiters said he had told her and other members of the community “some unbelievable story of how somebody plotted all this against him and he knows who it is”.
Some community members said Fisch was not the only one at fault.
“It takes two hands to clap,” said one mother, Shanon Ballakistan. “These are high school girls. Surely they know the difference between right and wrong.”
Boipelo Kenosi, a former pupil, said in a Facebook post that the girls involved with Fisch had received special treatment.
Motsamai Mabuya, a representative of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, said: “There could be more videos. This could be the tip of the iceberg.”
Gauteng department of education spokesman Steve Mabona said two pupils appeared in the photos, one of whom had so far been identified.
He said suspension letters had been served on two teachers, an administrator and another school staffer who had been identified in the videos and photographs.
Mabona said the department was planning to rescind the principal’s resignation so that he could be dismissed and deregistered from the South African Council for Educators.
Fisch resigned in October last year before the scandal broke and served his last day on January 15.
“The matter is with the legal division and a final decision is still pending,” Mabona said.