JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Middelburg | Wednesday
SOUTH Africa’s Human Rights Commission has urged Mpumalanga’s education department to broaden its probe into racial discrimination at state schools to include bias against the disabled and certain religions.
SAHRC commissioner Charlotte McClain said it was essential to deal with all discriminatory admission policies at schools and not to only single out racism.
“While the fight against racism is clearly very important, we also need to look at other forms of discrimination that keep disabled and poor learners, or those of certain religions, out of the schools of their choice,” she said.
Declining to comment further for fear of prejudicing investigations, McClain said the SAHRC had agreed to help retrain any school managers found guilty of discrimination.
Education MEC Craig Padayachee originally established an independent anti-racism task team to probe with complaints of racial discrimination in schools on January 9. He said at the time the task team would focus on allegations that racist admission policies were being administered in some of the province’s better equipped schools.
Declining to name schools where the abuses were allegedly occurring, Padayachee said in a statement that the task team would consist of a number of regional sub-committees and would deliver its first interim report this Friday.
The task team would also probe allegations that some formerly Afrikaans schools, which were recently forced to introduce English duel medium tuition, were discriminating against non-Afrikaans speakers.
He confirmed that the abuses appeared concentrated in the province’s urban, traditionally white suburban schools.
Mpumalanga’s 2 600 schools currently cater to almost one million pupils, and have been unable to meet the growing demand for seats in urban schools by township pupils dissatisfied with their under-resourced apartheid era schools.
Mpumalanga has been regularly rocked by racist clashes at its schools, including the attempts to exclude black or English speaking pupils at the Hoerskool Ben Viljoen and Hoerskool General Hertzog high schools in the province’s industrialised Highveld region. – African Eye News Service