Curro brushes off race furore
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CURRO Holdings CEO Chris van der Merwe brushed off suggestions that the racial furore at one of his schools will have a negative effect on the future of his business.
Instead, Van der Merwe said his company’s share price shot up by 3% at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange since the racial segregation story broke on Wednesday about the Curro Foundation School in Roodeplaat, Pretoria.
The private education company’s share was sitting at R31.89 on Monday and closed on Friday at R35.10. The business is worth R2billion.
Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi will visit the school tomorrow to get to the bottom of the allegations. His spokeswoman Phumla Sekhonyane said: We are very concerned about the allegations. The MEC will visit the school on Monday and get first-hand what’s going.”
Sekhonyane added that an independent investigation is ongoing”.
The allegations started on Tuesday when 30 black parents signed a petition against the school, citing their Grade R children were being kept in separate classes from their white peers.
According to one of the parents, they were alerted by a Grade R teacher who was concerned the children were being separated based on their skin colour.
The petition read in part: The distribution of learners within these classes is, in our view, unless proven otherwise, not appropriate and perpetuates racial and cultural segregation among the innocent children, both African and white who have no clue about racial history.
We view this in a very serious light as our kids are exposed to this racial segregation on a daily basis, which raises a concern regarding the quality of the education and support, on whether it is equally distributed in all the classes.”
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In his response, Van der Merwe said: I engineered a product to make private schools affordable like public schools. I accepted the fact that whites would be a minority.
We have more than 36 000 children and are fully integrated. We wanted to support the state, not alienate it, because it had to remedy the backlog.
We have 42 schools and they accommodate 36 000 children, 24 000 of them are black. Since 2011, we have built seven schools per annum. We want to have 80 schools by the year 2020.
We are 65% black and 35% white. With the 80 schools, we will accommodate 90 000 students. We anticipate that by then we will have 80% black and 20% white learners.”
Van der Merwe said they employed only two teachers of colour one in Cosmo City and the other in Soshanguve because they struggled to attract qualified black teachers. Van der Merwe established Curro, Latin for I Run”, in 1998 with 28 learners, who were taught out of a church building in Durbanville, Western Cape.
His future plans? To turn the group into a leading private education provider in the country. FLAMBOYANT dancer and choreographer Somizi Mhlongo has clinched a place as a member of the judging panel, it was announced yesterday on the first day of auditions at the State Theatre in Pretoria.
He will be the fourth judge alongside record label executive and long-serving panelist Randall Abrahams, who has been with the show for the past 11 seasons. Also on the panel is singer Unathi Msengana, who is in her fourth season, and radio personality Gareth Cliff, who has been with since the second season of the reality TV talent search show.
An excited Mhlongo said before he was introduced to the hordes of wannabe Idols that he literally couldn’t sleep the night before.
I’ve never had a wedding but I imagine it feels a little like this. I’ve known about this for about two months already and I didn’t tell a soul. Not even Unathi, and we ve been working on her music video every day.” Said producer and director Gavin Wratten, Somizi is showbiz. He understands what it takes for a performer to engage an audience over and above just the music.”
Mhlongo has also judged talent in the two seasons of