Pretoria - Parents of Afrikaans pupils at the Theresapark Primary School in Akasia, Pretoria, have threatened legal action against the Gauteng Department of Education if their concerns that their children are being marginalised are not addressed within two weeks.
Tensions ran high outside the school last week when officials from the department came face-to-face with the parents. The parents are claiming that their Afrikaans-speaking children are being shunned and that they are taught in places outside the classrooms, such as in a storeroom.
The parents handed over a memorandum to representatives of the department in which they are asking for an urgent investigation into the treatment of their children. The disgruntled parents claim that white Afrikaans children are also being told to leave the school and to find another school which caters for them.
They have threatened legal action if their grievances are not taken seriously. A parent said that they would also approach the South African Human Rights Commission if the department did not urgently address the issues.
The parent said the Afrikaans pupils have been given two weeks notice to “get out” and to look for another school. According to him, some of the children are feeling intimidated and threatened because they are Afrikaans.
The parent said apart from taking the legal route if they don't get feedback from the department, the parents will be back to gather outside the school.
“I don’t know why they are trying to push out the Afrikaans-speaking children. We don't see any other school doing this… It seems that the department doesn’t even know what is going on,” the parent said.
He said that in his opinion there was a political agenda behind this to get rid of Afrikaans at the school. “We won’t stand for this,” he vowed.
A representative of the school’s governing body said it was untrue that learners were taught in the storeroom. “We don't operate this way,” he said.
The representative added that the governing body also did not have the power to simply kick pupils out of school. He, however, said that as there were very few Afrikaans pupils left in the school, the governing body did not deem it feasible to sustain these classes.
He said in some cases there were only seven or eight Afrikaans pupils in a class. He, however, accused the parents of trying to gain sympathy “for things that are not there.”
Gauteng Department of Education spokesperson, Steve Mabona, who was also at the school, told the parents it was insulting and disrespectful to say that officials didn’t know what they were doing.
He said in cases where schools were in the situation of having only seven pupils in a class, it was not unusual to make use of other spaces in which to teach. Other pupils needed the bigger spaces.
He said other schools made use of alternative spaces for teaching, such as in gymnasiums if the need was there. Mabona added that no one would be denied education because of language.
According to him, all spaces at schools are being used fruitfully. He pointed out that this school has also started a Tswana class, where the numbers were low. They too, he said, were taught in converted areas.
Independent Media, meanwhile, reported last year on Forest Village children in the Cape who were learning under trees, because they were rejected by local schools as they did not previously do Afrikaans as a subject.
This was according to education advocacy group, Equal Education. “Existing schools in the area are also contributing to the problem in that they refuse to accept learners that have not previously done Afrikaans,” said the organisation’s researcher Stacey Jacobs at the time.
Pupils and teachers were running a school under trees; using chairs, buckets, crates and other makeshift means for chairs and tables.
Equal Education Law Centre, at the time wrote to Western Cape Education MEC Debbie Schäfer regarding the matter of unplaced learners in Forest Village. The community late last year said that the district office had promised to send mobile classrooms but that promise was not kept.
Pretoria News