By Panyaza Lesufi
The rapid advance in standards and accountability in schools has led to a growing need to engage families and communities as partners.
Townships, suburbs and their communities are seldom able to stay healthy without good schools.
Schools are and should always be active partners with parents and communities through democratic school governing bodies (SGBs).
Parents, teachers and pupils are an important part of the process of improving schools, as is giving SGBs an effective voice in the decision-making .
To achieve this, the SA Schools Act 84 of 1996 requires that all public schools establish SGBs that are democratically elected.
This principle, as stated in Section 195 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, requires public administrators to encourage stakeholders to participate in decision-making processes in terms of the policies that impact on them.
The SGB election is the third largest after the national and provincial elections. In my province of Gauteng, the elections began on Monday and run until April 30.
The new members will take over once the elections have been declared free and fair at the end of the process.
When parents and other members of the community get involved in school affairs, they send a valuable message to their children. They show that they care about the learner’s success and the resulting benefit is that the children feel more confident.
Through SGBs, parents, principals and teachers together can establish new approaches to encourage joint efforts to improve learners’ education.
By engaging their communities, parents, businesses, civic and community members, SGBs create a culture that supports schools in their main mission – raising learner achievement.
One major and increasingly important purpose of SGBs is to connect the national government, provincial and local governments as well as local educators, with the real and diverse world of local people in a way that is close to the community, accountable to it, and which has the authority to act.
SGBs give parents a mechanism for engaging in decisions that affect their children. The ability to engage allows parents to effect change and feel invested in their children's schools and in the child’s education as a whole.
Certain core decision-making functions are fundamental to a school system's accountability to the public. The functions can be performed only by an elected governing body. They are:
◆ The establishment of a long-term vision for the school.
◆ The establishment and maintenance of a basic organisational structure for the school, including employment of the principal and teachers, adoption of an annual budget, adoption of governance policies, and creation of a climate that promotes excellence.
◆ The establishment of systems and processes to ensure accountability to the community, including fiscal accountability, accountability for programmes and learners outcomes and staff accountability.
◆ Advocacy on behalf of children and public education at the community, state and national levels.
The accountabilities prove that schools also are centres of community interaction. Our schools are a critical part of our communities.
Schools must engage those communities in order to thrive and prosper.
Let’s participate in the SGB elections across our rainbow nation and enhance our schools’ democratic values.
*Panyaza Lesufi is the MEC for Education in Gauteng.
**The views expressed here are not those of The Star or IOL.
The Star