Parents wary of sending children back to school
AS SOUTH Africans get ready to embrace the new month that comes with the lifting of many restrictions meant to curb the spread of Covid19, all eyes will be on schools and how they manage the much-debated reopening.
The Department of Basic Education has failed to allay the fears of parents who are concerned about the safety of their children.
Equally, teacher unions have urged their members to stay home if school management hasn’t delivered on the non-negotiables like the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE).
Some of these include masks
(for the teaching staff and learners), sanitisers and deep cleaning of schools. Well-run schools and mostly those that are in urban areas have easily ticked these boxes.
Some rural and township schools have not had running water since the dawn of democracy.
Some don’t have ablution blocks, forcing teachers and learners to suffer the indignity of answering the call of nature crouched in the bush. The education department should have foreseen this disparity of urban and rural schools, coming as we do, from a long history of disproportionate spending, where former white schools were prioritised more than others.
It’s now 26 years since a democratic dispensation took charge yet not much has been done to have a dedicated investment on education to redress the inequalities that exist.
Grade 7 and Grade 12 pupils, who will be the first to get back to school, have lost several weeks of schooling.
The concerns from parents and unions are real. Be that as it may, the issue of the safety of children should not be used as a political football to score points.
Those parents who want their children to remain at home have been urged to register for homeschooling.
The schools that have put trusted systems in place should open and those that have failed to give parents the assurance of safety shouldn’t.
It’s a gamble that’s not worth it. Time will tell if this decision to reopen schools was a sound one.
Sadly, human lives are at stake.