Thousands of pupils won’t be at school on Monday

Thousands of Eastern Cape pupils will not return to school on Monday as more grades across South Africa resume learning.

Provincial education spokesperson Loyiso Pulumani said 3,581 pupils had been exempted from attending school due to comorbidities.

This includes 2,050 who are classified as sick and 677 who have opted to stay home out of fear of contracting Covid-19.

Pulumani, meanwhile, said schools in the province were ready to welcome more pupils, with assistant teachers appointed.

Some teachers’ applications to work from home due to underlying conditions are waiting to be approved.

Of the more than 5,608 applications, Pulumani said 2,230 had been approved and more than 2,763 were pending.

An additional 589 were turned down and 26 were withdrawn.

“We are still recruiting [more assistant teachers] through the school governing bodies.

“We will know [the total] only once we have finalised adjudicating all teachers who applied to work from home,” he said.

He said school governing bodies would be able to buy more hand sanitisers or masks if their stocks ran out.

Some parents have opted to keep their children at home without applying for the exemption.

On the assistant teachers, Pulumani said they would each receive R7,000 a month.

In Nelson Mandela Bay about 400 assistant teachers had already been appointed and were expected in schools on Monday.

“With everyone working together, we can still recover the academic year,” Bay education district manager Ernest Gorgonzola said.

The teacher assistants will work as middle men between pupils and teachers who are working from home.

Pulumani said the education department had hired 18,970 support teams to decontaminate schools and ensure pupils adhered to social distancing and hand sanitising protocols.

“This makes schools safer than having children playing at home. Parents must know that we can still save the academic year,” he said.

Fedsas represents school governing bodies. Its CEO, Paul Colditz, said he believed the department of education was ready to open schools, although there might be infrastructure or delivery problems which should have been addressed.

“I believe there are enough contract teacher assistants.

“One of our associates managed to obtain 12,000 responses through a message on social media.”

National Association of School Governing Bodies CEO Matekanye Matakanye said the department of education was ready for schools to reopen although there was work that still needed to be done in the townships and rural areas.

Matakanye said he did not believe the department could afford to pay both teachers working from home and their assistants.

Teachers union SAOU's provincial secretary, Debbie Harvey, said they believed schools would be ready by Monday based on a survey of all their members nationwide.

“No, they haven’t resolved issues with water and infrastructure,” Harvey said.

In the past few months, schools in the Eastern Cape were inundated with protests by parents who raised concerns about poor infrastructure, teacher shortages and the overall safety of their children amid Covid-19.

Some parents, SGB members and unions have been calling for the school year to be forfeited, saying there is too little time to salvage it.

HeraldLIVE