Cape Town - Shooting has continued unabated for over a week in Lavender Hill with teachers fearing for the lives of some 4 000 pupils in their care and for their own lives.
On Sunday, Gavin Alkana, Hillwood Primary School's principal, which faces the field where many of the gangster shoot-outs occur, painted a grim picture of trauma experienced at the schools in the area.
From last Monday, when shooting escalated, Alkana said four people had reportedly been killed, which police could not confirm last week “due to a moratorium on statistics”.
Lavender Hill Gangwatch reported on Sunday that there had been shootings during the early hours of the morning and 12 shots were fired around midday.
Despite day and night “rapid gunfire” and “gangsters running around with AK47s in broad daylight, bullets flying past and over the school,” Alkana said the Department of Education insisted the schools remain open.
“Hillwood Primary School is situated in the centre of this violent storm.
"Two teachers were so traumatised that they were hospitalised due to one suffering a heart attack and the other a stroke at school.”
On Friday, following a protest by parents on Wednesday, when they locked out teachers and pupils at Lavender Hill High School and Levana and Hillwood Primary Schools and marched to Steenberg police station to protest the gang violence, many parents kept their children at home.
A teacher at Lavender Hill High, who did not want to be named, said that only 60 out of 1 000 pupils attended school on Friday, because the shootings had worsened.
“Even a Department of Education school inspector had to run for cover,” said the teacher.
The teacher said there was uncertainty at the schools as the “gangsters have taken over”.
“Education officials arrived in the area with police escorts, yet the teachers, learners and community have no such protection. The psychologists arrived with police escorts as well.”
Alkana added: “During counselling sessions when the bullets are flying, the psychologists break down, and those whom they are counselling now have to counsel them.”
He said the Department of Education had assigned armed security guards to Hillwood Primary School, which has 1 000 pupils, for the next two weeks, but “what happens thereafter?”.
Like the other three schools in the area, Hillwood will now receive a bulletproof fence, but Alkan wryly asked how many gang and non-gang members would have to die “before political and government will is ignited?”
Last week, Police Minister Fikele Mbalula, reporting on the repeat offender crime rates said: “What we are going to be doing in the next couple of weeks and months is to reposition the Tactical Response Teams back into the townships, in areas that are exposed to violent crimes.”