Cape Town - Determined to change people’s perception about Manenberg and transform the community’s socio-economic status, pupils from The Leadership College obtained a 92 percent matric pass rate.
The school, centred in the heart of the gang- and drug-affected community, is solely dependent on a government subsidy and donations to ensure pupils get free tuition and resources.
Top achiever, Dhilshaad Adonis,18, who obtained seven distinctions and was short of only 2 percent in getting eight distinctions, said her motivation throughout the year was trying to get her mother out of the taxi business.
“I live with my great-grandmother, my aunt, cousin and siblings. My mother is a taxi driver and my father is not active in my life,” she said.
“These results have only inspired me to continue at the pace that I have been working at. It was not easy, studying while neighbours were blasting music, my mother being busy making money seven days a week in a dangerous industry and dodging bullets while heading to school. But I did it.”