While 1,384 grade 1 and 8 pupils across Gauteng have not been placed in schools, other parents face the frustration of the distance their children have to travel to get to school.
Worried parents queued outside the Ekurhuleni North district offices in Benoni on Tuesday hoping to get answers on whether their children would be attending school from today.
Angel Mphambo from Tembisa, who had been camping outside the offices since 6am, called on the department to place their children nearer to home as the cost implications for her were too steep.
Mphambo’s son was placed at Beyers Naude Secondary School in Dube, Soweto, 60km away from where they live in Matikweni Section. She received an email on Tuesday that the school, three streets away from her house in Tembisa, Zitikeni Secondary School, had reached its capacity.
“For my son to commute to school every day would cost me about R70 a day if not more. I simply cannot afford that. I am unemployed and there is a school just a few streets from our house that he can walk to,” she said.
“My child is stressed. I am feeling helpless, so much so that I am going to forcefully have him go to the school close to my house. He is not staying at home.”
She said she applied for her son online in August, but received no response until she enquired on Monday and was told that the school of her choice was full.
She was one of the many parents who lined up in the hope of getting answers before schools re-open today. The queue stretched 150 metres from the department’s stairway, along Howard Street, down to the next street corner along Rothsay Street.
Appearing tired and worn out, some parents said they had been camping at the offices since 2am armed with camp chairs.
By 3pm, some had still not been helped. Angry parents would shout at officials who were managing the entrance into the building and occasionally cutting the queue.
“Why don’t you help us? Since yesterday you wouldn’t help us. Just open. We have been here for too long,” one parent shouted.
Among the common issues faced by parents was children being placed in a school that offers different languages from what the child had previously been taught in, and system glitches that led to them not receiving any response from the department.
A Kempton Park father, Kane Sithole, whose six-year-old daughter was placed at a school in Tembisa, said he was worried that she would struggle with changing languages.
“My daughter was already doing grade R at the school of our choice at Laerskool Edleen, now she will have to change environments and do a language that she is not used to,” he said.
“She did not do isiZulu at her previous school and having to do it for the first time will be a challenge for her.”
Parents called for an end to the online system, saying it did not work.
“My son’s application had been lingering since August last year. I uploaded everything when I did the application. When I check the status it says two schools have received all the documents, but they are full, while the other two school have not received documents,” said Sibusiso Makhaya, also of Kempton Park.
“I physically took the documents to one of the schools on Monday, but I still have not received any placement for my son.”
The Ekurhuleni North district, Tshwane and Joburg West were some of districts that had high volumes of pupils who had not yet been placed. Ekurhuleni had 501 grade 8 pupils and 236 grade 1s without schools.
During a press conference yesterday, education MEC Matome Chiloane said some of the reasons pupils were not placed were that schools had reached their maximum capacity and parents had submitted late applications. He also said the influx of people from other provinces into Gauteng was a problem.
He said the department had received 4,801 appeals from parents objecting to the placement of their children in particular schools.
The department acknowledged that about 200 of the appeals were legitimate appeals caused by admin errors at school level and were being attended to.
In Tshwane, 223 grade 8 pupils around Akasia and Theresa Park remain unplaced and in Johannesburg West, 434 grade 8 applicants remain unplaced in Roodepoort.
When the academic year started in 2022, 1,465 pupils had not been placed.
“We are faced with a situation where schools will either be overcrowded or learners will be sitting at home. We can’t have learners sitting at home."
The department said it anticipated that all pupils would be placed by the end of the month and catch-up programmes would be prepared for them.
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