Johannesburg - Gauteng Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi wants prisoners to clean school toilets to ensure they are always in a good condition for pupils and teachers to use.
Speaking at the release of the department’s sanitation report on Monday, Lesufi said schools would use community workers to ensure that toilets were clean.
“It is one thing to fix them and not clean them. We are now going to use community workers to clean them.
“I am in advanced discussions with correctional services to utilise prisoners to assist us with the cleaning of some of our facilities,” he said.
Earlier this year, lobby group Equal Education released a sanitation report that showed that prisoners at the Joburg Prison had better access to a toilet than high school pupils in Gauteng.
After the report, which covered 200 schools, Lesufi promised to improve sanitation in the province. He said that up to 578 schools that were in a bad state had been refurbished during the holidays.
“There are those that we call mobile classrooms and we have re-appointed an alternative technology to then re-establish those toilets.
“The 50 worst ones were finalised and were ready this morning (on Monday) to be utilised by learners.”
Lesufi said he was transferring R750 million to schools to buy toilet paper, soap and cleaning material for the toilets.
To ensure that Grade 12 pupils’ studies were not interrupted, the department had improved sanitation for matriculants at 375 schools where matrics had their own special sanitation, he said.
The Star