Parents at Theresa Park High School in Pretoria North are unhappy about the Gauteng education department’s failure to complete construction of the school, allegedly forcing pupils to learn in adverse conditions.
Parents demonstrated outside the school on Monday.
According to parents, the lack of proper classrooms has led to pupils attending classes rotationally in mobile classrooms in the yard of Amandasig High School. But these are not sufficient and pupils only attend school once or twice a week.
A parent of a 15-year-old grade 9 pupil, who did not want to be named, said there are no toilets or running water at the temporary structures.
“Since last year we have been promised that they are going to build a school. The problem is they started construction and they installed containers. There is another site which was supposed to be the permanent site of the school, but the children are still here. We have been promised several times they will move. The last date we were given was February 29, but nothing has happened,” she said.
I want my child to have his right to basic education because my child's right is being infringed upon
— Parent
Her child only attends school once a week on a Wednesday.
“There is no time for the teachers to make corrections; what they do is move forward, and it's not much because it's just one day. Everything else is correspondence. They are sending work on WhatsApp and bombarding our children, and we are supposed to be explaining things we don't understand. If you don't understand, as a parent, it means your child is [in trouble] because no-one is going to explain to them how it is done,” she said.
Adding to the parents' frustration is they still are required to pay school fees.
“I am not going to pay. Sorry. I am not going to pay R1,000 for four days a month. For 90% of the time he is alone, which makes him vulnerable to doing wrong things because there is no-one with him to check if he is doing the right things.”
The rotational attendance has brought safety concerns for children, she said.
“The transport operators don’t agree when you tell them your child only goes once a week, so it means you have to make sure your child uses public transport on that day. It is not reliable, even for adults, so imagine a child.
“You have to make a plan to pay the transport operator for the month even if your child goes to school four times a month. You become a teacher yourself because you have to make sure you put [in] applications to get extra time at home to make sure you teach your child some of the things.”
The rotational attendance has been happening since last year, and with the intake of the new pupils things had become worse.
She said she and other parents want their children moved to a school conducive for daily attendance and learning.
The parent of a grade 8 pupil said her 13-year-old child attends school twice a week. The 43-year-old mother said she applied to the department for placement and was sent to the school.
“The workload the children have at home, it is more like we are teaching the children or they are teaching themselves,” she said.
Children had expressed how frustrated teachers were, especially with the large number of pupils they had to teach under adverse conditions.
“I am one of the people who went to the new site at the school. It looks like the school is almost complete, only small things are left. Our main concern is why is the department not pushing for these things to be completed so children can go to school full-time because the first term is already ending,” she said.
“I want my child to have his right to basic education because my child's right is being infringed upon. I want him to go to school Monday to Friday and receive the best-quality education, not second-grade education. If the department can finish the school and let our children go to school full-time [this would happen, but] they just opened the school and threw children there. I don't think they thought parents would complain.”
TimesLIVE Premium sent questions to the education department. The department had not replied at the time of publication.
Speaking to the SABC, however, department spokesperson Steve Mabona said classroom furniture was among the things still outstanding at the new school. The department would ensure everything is in place by next Monday, he said. More teachers would be brought in. The school would use a borehole, which has already been prepared, for the toilets and drinking water.
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