Johannesburg - Non-profit organisation Equal Education (EE) is going back to court to try to force the government to provide meals to all qualifying pupils of the school feeding schemes.
EE and the school governing bodies of Vhulaudzi Secondary School and Mashao High School in Limpopo are returning to court against the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and provincial education departments for failing to roll out the National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP) to every eligible learner for more than a year.
The two schools are represented by Section27 and the Equal Education Law Centre (EELC).
The non-profit organisations announced on Tuesday that they were asking for a new court order that declared that education officials had not met their constitutional obligations to provide daily meals to all qualifying pupils, and had not fulfilled the requirement to submit plans and monitoring reports.
In July last year, Acting Deputy Judge President Sulet Potterill ruled in a declaratory order that Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga and eight education MECs were in breach of their constitutional duties for failing to roll out the NSNP to all eligible pupils – whether at school or at home.
However, the education activists said in a joint statement that a year later, education officials had failed to develop practical or realistic plans for the NSNP which address the new realities of schooling during Covid-19, and many vulnerable pupils were missing out on daily school meals.
They added that many provincial departments had also stopped submitting the monitoring reports that the court had ordered them to compile.
“Partly due to the shortcomings in rolling out the NSNP, child hunger has remained horribly high over the past year, with the numbers of households reporting child hunger almost double what it was before the pandemic,” the organisations said.
They added that according to the last report they received from the DBE in March, about 1.5 million pupils across the country were not receiving the daily school meals they qualified for. The NSNP was supposed to feed more than 9 million pupils.
“The education MECs and Motshekga should give the court reasons why they shouldn’t be fined or sent to jail for being in contempt of the court order. We are asking the court to order the national and provincial education departments to file new, revised plans to deliver the NSNP, that take into account the continued challenges posed by Covid-19,” said EE, Section27 and EELC.
They added that parents and caretakers had spoken of the physical and emotional stress of pupils not getting meals, especially when breadwinners had lost income due to lockdown.
“It affects my child badly (when there are no school meals), to the point that he uses his time to study by finding part-time jobs to contribute to the family,” said one parent.
“If there is no food (from the NSNP) I sacrifice my taxi amount to buy the little we need (to feed the family),” another parent said.
The organisations said new plans for the NSNP must be responsive to the challenges schools faced during Covid-19, and must cater for high school pupils who would have to continue attending school according to a rotational timetable.
The Star