Catering for school-going criminals is one of the many challenges facing special-needs education, writes Julia Grey
Running a school where the only admission requirements are that learners are convicted criminals and of school-going age has it’s own special demands.
Ethokomala in Mpumalanga is one of only two reform schools in the country that caters for this kind of special-needs learner. Youngsters from all provinces who are convicted of a crime, from housebreaking to murder, are committed to Ethokomala for as long as two years.
The kinds of additional education needs of the learners are many, and also costly to meet – the school accounts for R9-million of the provincial education department’s budget annually. Besides running a hostel that can house 160 learners, additional staff, such as childcare workers, social workers and a medical sister, are also paid for by the state. According to Thoko Mabena, who has been at Ethokomala as both teacher and social worker since 1988, the school runs various specialist programmes. These include workshops on the dangers of drugs and Aids, as well as programmes about the dangers of absconding from the school – something that happens quite often, “especially those using drugs who want to jump the fence and get dagga”, says Mabena.
A massive problem for educators and learners alike at Ethokomala is the cumbersome justice system. “Many stay for a long time in jail – as long as six or nine months -awaiting trial,” says Mabena. “When they get here, they’ve already adopted the culture of the prisons.”
The impact on the maintenance of school discipline is significant. Imitating their older counterparts, these young criminals bring the gangster culture into the school. A recent fight at the hostel between the so-called 26s and 28s – whose distinct tattoos indicate their membership – resulted in 77 of the 90 learners being removed from the school and being placed temporarily in places of safety. When the Teacher visited Ethokomala, the remaining 13 pupils were renovating the school and improving their painting skills, according to Mabena.
He says there’s a marked difference in the behaviour of those who come from places of safety rather than from prison. But even those learners lucky enough to be spared a dose of prison life easily become embroiled in the school’s gang culture: “You will find a guy who has never been to prison. Then he is forced to join a gang, and you will see a fresh tattoo on the child.”
Sigamoney Naicker, director of special-needs education in the national Department of Education, says such problems in the child justice system are to be addressed in the future. The department has just approved research into the system by the Department of Justice, and action will be taken by the Department of Education in light of the findings. Educators at Ethokomala also inherit other problems, such as the lack of formal education. The bulk of the learners, aged between 13 and 18, are in the foundation phase, and for some, their time at Ethokomala is their first and only experience of receiving an education. Typically, these learners are thoroughly demotivated and “only a very small percentage see the value of education. When they go out of the school, many of them go back to crime,” says Mabena.
Brendon (not his real name) spent six months in jail awaiting trial before being convicted for housebreaking. He says he started his career as a thief in Standard 2, when he stole some sweets and chips. Now aged 16, this is his second time through the child justice system; from Port Elizabeth, he was previously committed to the reform school in Cape Town, a place he prefers to Ethokomala. “We stay the whole time in the hostel here, which is worse,” says Brendon. “There’s no way it can be easy to fit in here. I just want to go home.”
At the moment Brendon has no choice but to do his time at Ethokomala. But the new approach to those who experience barriers to learning, set out in the white paper on special-needs education, might eventually make a difference for petty criminals like Brendon. Inclusion – mainstreaming learners with various special education needs – might avert the pitfalls of putting older, more hardened criminals together with those who “made a simple mistake”, says Mabena.
However, Naicker says such learners “pose a serious challenge to us with regard to how innovative we can be. Some may be a security risk to mainstream schools. “On the other hand, we need to offer those at reform schools for petty crimes some hope. We have to implement a policy that is reasonable, sensitive to both the mainstream school and the individual learner.”
– The Teacher/M&G Media, Johannesburg, October 2001.