People’s power is being exercised in an attempt to ensure an education for citizens that the state is currently not providing. Fed up with the exclusion of their children from public schools, residents of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, have set up their own school.
The People’s Power Secondary School has registered 1 800 students in the past month, says Max Ntanyana, a Khayelitsha resident and member of the Western Cape-based Anti-Eviction Campaign, which is assisting residents in setting up and running the school.
”All the students have been excluded from other schools on grounds concerning school fees, failure last year, or age,” Ntanyana told the Mail & Guardian this week. ”Education is a right: no one should be penalised because they are poor. We’re not prepared to be victims any longer. The government must adhere to the demands of our community with immediate effect.”
Multiple cases countrywide of learners being excluded from schools for cost-related reasons prompted the government to announce in September last year that it would review its education financing policies.
Minister of Education Kader Asmal told Parliament in the third week of February that he had received his Department of Education’s ”draft report … I will, in the very near future, be proposing far-reaching changes in the area of financing of education.”
He specified relief for ”poorer schools”, referred to the costs involved in fees, transport and school uniforms, and said ”great disparities” still exist in school infrastructure.
Over the past year the M&G has reported on research revealing numerous cases countrywide in which these costs serve to deny children access to basic education, despite the stated aims of government policy.
Flaws in the policy itself as well as abuses of it have been the focus of research conducted since February last year by the Education Rights Project (ERP).
”The Anti-Eviction Campaign and other social movements have been bringing multiple instances involving violations of constitutional rights to the attention of the ERP,” says Salim Vally, acting director of Wits University’s Education Policy Unit.
Examples of widespread illegal practices the ERP has found include schools refusing to register pupils whose fees are unpaid, or insisting on a deposit or prepayment of fees. Inadequate state transport subsidies added to the costs of school uniforms and other school-related expenses keep many children out of school, the ERP has found.
”These community initiatives are important,” Vally says of the Khayelitsha residents’ action. ”The unleashing of creative community energies needs to be encouraged and tapped, not undermined. While we are waiting for the government’s review of its education finance policies, children are still being denied their rights on an ongoing, daily basis.
The Khayelitsha initiative is a striking case of what the ERP has been recording nationally — a groundswell demand for justice that is gaining momentum.”
People’s Power Secondary School has been set up in the Andile Nhose Community Centre in Mandela Park. ”The Western Cape Department of Education came last week to inspect the school,” Ntanyana says. ”We want the department to register the school, and will meet the department again about this.
”We also want the department to provide more classroom space — even if only in the form of prefabs — until it builds new infrastructure.” The community centre’s 12 rooms now accommodate between 90 and 120 pupils each, and People’s Power ”urgently needs support”, Ntanyana says.
”There is no stationery or textbooks, though residents are collecting paper and pens.” But the school does have computers: ”Donated by Old Mutual to Khayelitsha residents and located in the community centre, they are available to the school’s students.”
The school’s 18 teachers are all graduates of Western Cape universities and colleges, Ntanyana told the M&G, and some were teaching elsewhere part-time before joining People’s Power. ”But they are not being paid yet.”
The school has been registering students for grades eight to 12. But because of space constraints, ”grade 12 students, who are facing matric exams this year, start their classes only in the afternoon”, Ntanyana says.
Western Cape MEC for Education AndrÃ