Elections for school governing body (SGB) representatives have started across South Africa, with parents urged to take responsibility and get involved in the running of their children’s schools.
SGB representatives are elected every three years, with its members drawn from all the stakeholders at a school, including parents, educators, learners and non-teaching staff.
“It’s extremely important that parents especially go out and make their voices heard in these elections”, says Jaco Deacon of the Federation of Governing Bodies of South African Schools (Fedsas).
Fedsas represents more than 1100 public schools in all nine provinces, and is the largest organisation of its kind in the country.
“Often you have the case where parents complain from afar about the way their children’s schools are being run and now they have an opportunity to change this.”
Fedsas and other similar organisations such as the National Association of SGBs (NASGB) have been hard at work spreading the message about the elections, which should be completed by the end of June, although some provinces will only finalise the process by September.
“We estimate that 12-million people are eligible to take part in the voting and hopefully we will see a very high turnout, considering the work we have put in,” says Deacon.
“Already I received indications from one school in the rural Free State that they received a turnout of 72% on their first day.”
This sentiment was echoed by Funda Mani of the NASGB.
“We have been hard at work publicising the importance of this voting process and hopefully it will pay off for us. Already there have been positive signs at the schools I visited yesterday, but at this stage it is too early to tell,” says Mani.
Mani says that while the national and provincial department might not have done enough to highlight the importance of the elections his organisation decided to ‘take responsibility’ and worked with religious and traditional leaders to get their message out to the public.