If an Afrikaans school has a place or two available, English-speaking pupils are immediately placed therein, with the requirement that the school initially becomes a double medium, leading to a final English-language school. There is no place for exclusive language schools.
If other language groups are involved, other criteria apply.
It appears from a situation in Tulbach in the Western Cape.
Learners from a crowded Afrikaans school in Tulbagh are placed in the asbestos building, while a new school built at R71m outside the town, is using only Xhosa and English as a language of instruction, and remains half empty because Tulbagh’s community is predominantly Afrikaans speaking.
Jaco Prince, the FF Plus organizer in the Western Cape, said that according to the website of the DA-controlled Western Cape Education Department, there are 1 250 pupils in the new school with more than 28 different classrooms. However, because there are so few Xhosa pupils in and around Tulbagh, there are currently only about five hundred pupils in the school, and many of them carted by bus from other places.
Prince said there is great unhappiness among the community of Tulbagh. They say Afrikaans speakers make up 95% of the community and that the department’s first priority should be to remove their children from the dangerous conditions of the asbestos classrooms.
According to the community, many promises have been made over the years to replace the asbestos classrooms, but it never happened. There is also considerable unhappiness about the Western Cape Department of Education, which, according to the community, do not communicate with them about the matter.
Prince said it’s a waste of money to build such a big and expensive school for exclusively Xhosa and English speakers, thus rendering other students the right to use it regarding language. He said it is also totally unacceptable that pupils still have to go to school in an asbestos classroom.
Read the original article in Afrikaans on Die Vryburger
South Africa Today – South Africa News
