Pretoria - Equal Education and the governing bodies of two Limpopo schools are to again ask the court to ensure that education authorities provide learners with meals.
About 1.5 million learners across the country who qualify for daily school meals are not receiving them.
The schools and Equal Education, represented by Section27 and the Equal Education Law Centre, will later this months ask the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, to obtain an order against the Department of Basic Education and provincial education departments for failing for more than a year to roll out the National School Nutrition Programme.
Julia Chaskalson of Section27 said they would ask for a new order that declares that education officials had not met their constitutional obligations to provide daily meals to all qualifying learners.
She said the education authorities also failed to fulfil the requirement to submit plans and monitoring reports as ordered by Judge Sulet Potterill in July last year.
“The education MECs and Minister Angie Motshekga should give the court reasons why they should not be fined or sent to jail for being in contempt of the court order.
“We are asking the court to order the national and provincial education departments to file new revised plans to deliver the programme and that take into account the continued challenges posed by Covid-19,” Chaskalson said.
The applicants will ask the court to order that these new plans be filed within a month, and that the education departments file monthly updates on implementing the new solutions with the court, until the court says they can stop doing so.
Last year the court ordered that Motshekga and the MECs for eight provinces must roll out the food programme to all qualifying learners – regardless of whether they had physically returned to school or not.
Yet a full year later, education officials had failed to develop practical or realistic plans for the programme which addressed the new realities of schooling during Covid-19.
Many vulnerable learners were missing out on daily school meals, Chaskalson said.
Many provincial education departments have also stopped submitting the monitoring reports that the court ordered them to compile.
After trying to resolve these problems directly with national and provincial education departments through letters and submissions, the applicants are now going back to court to demand that they comply with the June 2020 court order.
Many learners have been forced to attend school according to a rotational timetable because of Covid-19.
Partly due to the shortcomings in rolling out the programme, child hunger remained very high over the past year, with a high number of households reporting that child hunger was almost double what it was before the pandemic.
“In our own recent survey of school officials and parents we found that: of the 53 schools surveyed, 49% (26 schools) said that not all learners receive meals on the days they are not at school due to rotational timetables,” Chaskalson said.
Chaskalson said the situation was particularly bad in Limpopo, where 13 of the 22 schools surveyed said learners do not receive meals on days that they are at home.
She said it was clear that this was a problem in each of the provinces surveyed, with at least half of all parents/caregivers saying their children did not receive meals when they were at home.
Parents/caregivers spoke of the physical and emotional stress of learners not getting meals, especially when breadwinners had lost their income due to the lockdown.
While the court last year ordered the provincial education departments to develop plans to provide meals to learners when they could not be at school, they had continuallly failed to come up with solutions to overcome barriers to providing school meals.
“Many provinces have repeatedly failed to submit full monitoring reports, or any data at all, on delivery,” Chaskalson said.
New plans for the programme had to be realistic and responsive to the challenges South African schools faced during Covid-19 and had to cater for high school learners who would have to continue attending school according to a rotational timetable, she said.
Pretoria News