Ernest Mabuza
6 July 2009
Johannesburg — THE admission policy of Hoerskool Ermelo was nonracial because the school admitted pupils of all races willing to receive tuition in Afrikaans, the school and its governing body have said in a written submission to the Constitutional Court.
The governing body and Mpumalanga education department are litigating over the school's Afrikaans-only language policy.
The school and the governing body are opposing the department's appeal against the Supreme Court of Appeal judgment in March that the governing body, and not the department, had exclusive power to determine the language policy of an existing school.
The matter is to be heard next month.
In its submissions filed last month, the department argued that the governing body's preservation of the Afrikaans language policy at the school at all costs demonstrated that it intended to preserve the school exclusively for Afrikaners.
In January 2007, the governing body raised eyebrows when it refused to change to a parallel AfrikaansEnglish policy to accommodate 27 pupils who wanted to be taught in English.
The head of department then withdrew the function of determining the language policy from the governing body.
Advocates for the school Wim Trengove SC and Nadine Fourie, said there were 34 black pupils enrolled in 2007 who wanted to receive tuition in Afrikaans.
They said the accusations of racism were based on a perception that the school's language policy was designed to retain the school's resources for the exclusive benefit of its pupils to the exclusion of others.
Trengove and Fourie said the South African Schools Act made it clear that the governing body was required to determine the school's language policy in the best interests of the school and its pupils.
They argued that the school could not accommodate a parallel stream of English pupils because it would require additional English classes for every subject choice.
"The school does not have any spare classrooms to accommodate additional classes. It already uses all its classrooms.
"The school can only accommodate an English stream by cutting down its curriculum," they said.
Trengove and Fourie said the education MEC had the duty to provide enough public school places while a school's language policy was left to governing body's discretion.
"It must exercise this discretion ... in the interests of the school and the quality of the education of its learners," they said.
The governing body "need not have regard to the interests of the community at large".
Trengove and Fourie acknowledged that apartheid left a vast discrepancy between the public and private resources of white and black SA.
They said formerly white public schools had been, and by and large remained, better resourced than formerly black schools.
They also said formerly black public schools had been, and by and large still were, poorly resourced.
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