Cape Town - Education MEC Debbie Schäfer is facing yet another court battle in her attempts to close yet another school.
The former white school of Graafwater High, which has existed for 102 years, is facing closure. Closure means its mostly coloured pupils will have to travel over 60km a day to and from Lamberts Bay.
Graafwater High’s closure was approved by the authorities in order to re-purpose the school, and other schools, to make way for a high school in Lambert’s Bay and a special needs school in Graafwater.
After the news of the school closure surfaced in the community in 2019, residents protested and alleged threats became increasingly violent.
Schäfer apparently approached the high court for an interdict to prevent anyone from unlawfully protesting at the school or entering the premises.
Arguments were heard at the Western Cape High Court on Monday, with advocate Liuba Stansfield representing Schäfer, and advocate Paul Jehro representing the community.
The case was postponed to Monday for further information. One of the Graafwater residents at court, Adam Kotze, 72, said for more than 100 years the community had used the school without problems.
Kotze said the school had a 100% pass rate, year after year.
“Our community, the coloured community of Graafwater, has had the school for the last two years. Now they have taken the school away from us. It is not a primary school, it is a high school,” he said.
“Our children must now travel with buses to Lambert’s Bay. They say the school must close because we don’t have enough children. There are now four buses travelling to Lambert’s Bay to that school, that is not a school – only 10 housing units that they put down there, that our children must now go to school in,” said Kotze.
Activist Franklin Adams said the plans impacted pupils and the community and were unfair.
ANC MPL and the party’s provincial spokesperson on education Khalid Sayed it identified with the struggle of the community of Graafwater.
He called the school’s closure “self-orchestrated chaos by the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) and its MEC”.
He said that from as early as 2019 it had warned against the arbitrary closing of the historic school, which had served the community for decades.
“As the ANC, we are not opposed to the decision to start a special needs school on the West Coast, but we vehemently oppose the dictatorship involved in the process, especially on the part of the MEC, who now acts as an authoritarian,” said Sayed.
He said the community was not properly consulted on the decision, all concerns they raised were ignored, and that was what started the protests. It was the arbitrary closing down of the school that caused all those tensions.
Schäfer said no decision to close or re-purpose any school in the Western Cape was arbitrary.
“It is quite shocking that Sayed shows no concern for the pupils who are attending the re-purposed school, which provides for special needs pupils,” she said.
Sayed said the Legislature’s social cluster went on an oversight visit to the Graafwater Special School recently, and it found that the school was not really full.
“So we don’t think there was a need to close down Graafwater High School in order to have a school of skills… That school is also overcrowded as we speak.