Parents and teachers of Mary Waters High pupils will be right behind them when they take to the streets on Monday, in protest, after their third successive week without crucial classes.
Parents and teachers of Mary Waters High pupils will be right behind them when they take to the streets on Monday, in protest, after their third successive week without crucial classes.
The provincial education department took the radical step last year of declining to renew the contracts of temporary teachers, saying they needed to conduct an audit before they assigned what they considered extra staff to schools.
Grocott’s Mail previously reported that 4 219 temporary teachers’ contracts were terminated last year, largely due to overspending by the department. “We’re fed up. It’s us who will be badly affected – not our
parents, and not our teachers,” said Mihlalikazi Swartbooi, 18.
“This will have a bad impact on our end-of-year results. We feel unlucky because we have less teachers, and we seriously need help,” said Geneva Bouwer, 20.
While Mary Waters pupils claim their school is the worstaffected in Grahamstown – the school is short of 11 teachers across all its grades, including in Grade 12. other local schools affected by the layoffs include Victoria Primary, TEM Mkrwetyana High (both one teacher short), Nombulelo High and Nathaniel Nyaluza
High (both three teachers short).
ictoria Primary is paying the temporary teacher from its own coffers; others have chosen to share teaching duties among the remaining staff.
“Our frustration has reached boiling point,” said Mary Waters High principal, Samuel Wessels, after the
school decided at a recent parents’ meeting to take their frustrations on to the streets on Monday.
“The future of our Grade 12s looks bleak, because even though everyone tries to go the extra mile, the education we give to our children is not the same as when we have a full staff,” said Wessels.
Wessels, like the other remaining 27 teachers, has stepped in. He has taken over the Grade 12 history class. But even with sharing teaching duties, Wessels said, the children’s education was being compromised.
Errol Goliath, chairman of the school governing body, said there was now one teacher to 40 or 50 children – far above the department’s required 1:35 ratio.
Goliath said while each class was supposed to receive five lessons a day, lack of staff meant pupils could now miss an entire day’s classes, because there was no one to teach them.
“We are trying to build normality in an abnormal situation,” said Wessels. A parent whose child is in Grade 8 at Mary Waters High said, “I feel as if my child's right to education is not being honoured.”
The parent, who wishes to remain anonymous, claimed the Grade 8s had not been taught anything since opening day, except for introductory classes on the first day of school, January 19.
To make matters worse, said Grade 12 pupil, Phiwokuhle Bay, 18, sharing teachers meant students who understood little Afrikaans, including her, suffered, since sometimes a teacher was fluent only in that language. Some teachers, she said, had taken to addressing classes in both English and Afrikaans.
“We have exhausted all avenues,” said Goliath. On Monday, parents, school teachers and pupils will march from the school grounds to the local district office of the education department on the corner of St Aidans Avenue and Milner Street, to hand over a petition containing their demand for more 11 teachers.
Anxious not to be caught short when the June exams arrive, a group of Grade 12 Physics and Mathematics pupils will start an after-school study group with their counterparts in Nombulelo and Nathaniel Nyaluza high schools.
At the time of going to print the department’s spokesperson Loyiso Pulumani had not responded to our queries.
