Cape Town - Community leaders and volunteer teachers say they will
fight to make sure that a new school they started earlier this month stays
open. The school has taken in about 260 learners who could not be placed in the
two schools in Joe Slovo Park in Milnerton.
The
informal school operates from prefabricated classrooms on Freedom Way that were used by Sinenjongo High School before it
moved to another site nearby, GroundUp reports.
A
community leader who helped start the school, Luthando Lekevana, confirmed that the main aim was to take children who were
unplaced and teach them.
"The
school that was here has been moved somewhere else and this space was left as
is, with the containers. But even though some of the containers have been taken
away, we as the community decided to use the ones that were left to start
classes for these children," he explained.
"What
we've heard is that some of the containers have been put in other schools. But
if all these containers are taken, what will happen to this land? There has
already been talk among people in the
community that they want to build their shacks on this land. So I take my hat
off to the community leaders who made sure that instead of this land being
invaded, we did something useful," said Lekevana.
But the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) does not recognise the school.
Enrolment
fees
Spokesperson
Jessica Shelver said the land it was on had been temporarily leased by the WCED
from the City of Cape Town to accommodate learners from Sinenjongo High School
while completing the new school. But the site had been vacated after the new
building was finished.
"The
site is not a school and any education that takes place at the site will not
formally be recognised. Parents must work with the district officials to ensure
that their children are enrolled at nearby schools," said Shelver.
To deal
with the problem of unplaced children she said mobile units have been
"earmarked" to provide "for any learner of compulsory
school-going age at nearby schools".
Shelver also said there were allegations that parents were being asked to
pay to enrol children at the informal school, and that "other community
structures" had requested that the money be
paid back.
She said
this led to chaos at a meeting on Tuesday night because "those implicated
individuals do not want to pay the money back".
Responding to this, an administrator at the school, Nasiphi Getyengana, said
parents who enrolled their children for Grade R were the only ones who had been
asked to pay a R100 fee "to help pay
the [volunteer] teachers in the three Grade R classes".
Parents
of learners in other grades had not been charged.
Situation
'highlights challenges'
The
informal school, which has no name, has classes from Grade R to Grade 8, and
learners are taught by volunteers.
Classrooms
have no desks and learners use chairs that were donated to write on.
Nolubabalo
Mkhethwa, who is involved in the day-to-day running of the school, said:
"Each class has about 30 learners or fewer. Grade R has three different
classes. We currently offer subjects like English, IsiXhosa, Life Skills,
Mathematics, Economics and Management Sciences. We don't have textbooks and
learners either bring their own stationery or we provide what's been donated to
us."
Shelver
said the situation at the school "again highlights the challenges that we
face when dealing with late registrations. These challenges are made even
greater by the concentrated areas into which learners migrate at short notice
and the ever-increasing budgetary constraints".
