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EYES that are mounted on nine metre high concrete masts, that can scan 360 degrees in one second, and that have a 300-fold digital zoom capability, are watching Levana Primary School in Lavender Hill, 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

On Friday the Premier of the Western Cape, Ebrahim Rasool, and the MEC for Education in the Western Cape, Cameron Dugmoore, pushed the button to activate a new Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) system at the school and to launch a new era in school security.

The Western Department of Education has commissioned a contractor to install CCTV systems at 60 high-risk schools in the Western Cape as part of the Safe Schools Programme to protect the safety of the pupils at the school, and to curb vandalism.

These close circuit cameras are connected to a central location that will monitor and report any suspicious activities at Levana Primary School directly to an armed response support that will be on the scene in less than 10 minutes. This security boost has been valued at R180 000. Rasool says that he had mixed feelings when the CCTV cameras were switched on.

"It is sad that we have reached this point.

"CCTV, burglar bars, fences, Bambanani volunteers and police reservists cannot be our vision for education," he says.

Rasool says that victories at school have now become ways to find out who is trying to sell drugs at school, or to see who is bullying whom on the playground.

He says he envisioned that security measures on the outside of the school would enable teachers and pupils to focus on education in the classroom, so as to re-instill "the high ideals" that teachers had when they went to university.

"Some schools have become glorified care-givers. We need to remove the excuse at schools of 'School is too unsafe, so I cannot teach.'"

He says that the Western Cape has reached a point of 23% unemployment, but that he believes that the problem of unemployment lies in the fact that people are unemployable, because they are unskilled or semi-skilled.

MEC Dugmoore focused on the need for a secure environment at schools and says that a strong message needs to be sent out to criminals that these cameras are going to catch them.

"The eyes of the government on you," says Dugmoore.

Gert Witbooi, the media liaison officer for the office of the MEC for Education, says that the first phase of the project involved installing and monitoring the system at five schools, before it was to be installed installing at the other schools.

He says that during the monitoring phase of the project, some of the schools reported that their pupils were better behaved during breaks. Another school said they could identify and discipline pupils who were scaling fences during school times.

A third school reported that theft around the school had declined because criminals were aware that CCTV cameras were watching them.

Thus far, the contractors have already installed CCTV systems at 44 schools, and they are currently installing the system at the 16 remaining schools.

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