Durban - The Independent Schools Association national head, Jane Hofmeyr, has defended the right of member schools to sue parents who default on their fees and, as a last resort, to bar children from class, saying contracts signed between parents and a school are legal and binding.
Hofmeyr was reacting to media reports last week when Durban High Court Judge Graham Lopes was reported to have rapped Durban Girls’ College over the knuckles for threatening to bar defaulting pupils.
“Our schools have a legal, contractual agreement with parents which gives the school the right to stop accepting a child whose parents have not paid their fees,” Hofmeyr said.
Parents who enrolled their children at independent schools signed a contract agreeing to remove their children if they defaulted on fees.
The association’s member schools did not have a constitutional obligation to continue to take a child when fees were in arrears, as in state schools, she said. When parents failed to meet repayment plans, a school was forced to ask the parents to withdraw their children.
She added that defaulting parents often ignored this request. Hofmeyr said the association’s schools were bound by a code of ethics to make sure parents who owed money did not enrol their children at another member school until they had fully paid up their fees.
Durban Girls’ College took two sets of parents to court last week to recover up to R200 000 in outstanding fees of which some had accumulated since 2007, they said in their court papers.
College principal Thomas Hagspihl said in his affidavit that despite attempts to recover the money for at least a year and warnings that the children would be “excluded” the parents continued to drop them off for class each day.
Educational lawyer Diane Gammie, the chairwoman of the Durban Girls’ College board, said sending a child to an independent school was not a right but a choice.
“The legal process we follow has been in place for many years… The court’s decision is then a formal record of the school’s rights and we can then enforce those rights knowing that we are correct in the procedure we are following,” she said.
Judge Lopes awarded a consent order in which one parent was told to settle the account in monthly instalments of R5 000, while the other has asked for time to come up with the money. The parents were also ordered to pay the costs of the application.
- The Mercury