Cape Town - Education MEC Debbie Schäfer said gang violence in schools continues to pose a threat to a safe learning environment and further highlighted initiatives undertaken by the Western Cape Government to try to curb it.
Schäfer was tabling her department’s budget.
Equal Education (EE) researcher, Stacey Jacobs, agreed with Schäfer’s assessment.
Jacobs said Schäfer highlighted the Risk Classification Tool which was developed to ensure that the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) can identify and classify existing and emerging safety threats, so that relevant security infrastructure and other resources are deployed when and where most needed.
She said they were aware, “through engagements with the WCED, the extension of the implementation of the tool is targeted at 100 schools for 2019”.
“While EE is encouraged by the potential of the tool, it remains unclear whether the WCED still intends on implementing it at 100 schools in 2019, as no implementation plan was outlined in the MEC’s budget vote,” Jacobs said.
She said they were also concerned about how the R112518 million is allocated over the 2019 Medium-Term Expenditure Framework to school safety initiatives.
"There is no publicly available information on how the budget is spent," she said.
Schäfer said more than 113000 pupils were relocated to the Western Cape since 2014, with an additional 20000 pupils arriving for the start of the 2019 academic year.
She said each primary school pupil that enters the province costs the department about R15500 and a high school pupil costs R18700, per year, excluding infrastructure costs.
“The cost over the past five years is more than R1.84 billion, and for this year alone is an estimated R596m.
Schäfer responded to thousands of children who were still not placed in schools in crisis in Mfuleni as there were no available spaces.
She said since 2009, “we have completed 131 schools and this year we will see the completion of 11 schools”.
“In order to accommodate the additional 20000 extra pupils this year alone, we effectively need another 20 new schools, which cost around R60m - R75m per school. This totals around R1.5bn.”
“Given that we have similar numbers every year, we require that kind of budget every year just for new schools. Given that we still have backlogs in our existing infrastructure, as well as have to maintain our existing infrastructure, it is quite obvious that the amount allocated is insufficient, and then there are teachers, feeding schemes, transports and so on.”
The SA Democratic Teachers Union’s provincial secretary, Jonavon Rustin, said Schäfer has done a “shabby” job when addressing the spate of problems of the poor.
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