Alexandra’s Minerva High School was one of the four Gauteng secondary school finalists which participated in the recent national championships of the Youth Citizens Action Programme.
The school was beaten to the crown in the end by Solomon Mahlangu High School from the Eastern Cape.
The Eastern Cape school was crowned the 2015 Youth Citizens Action Programme national winner in the secondary school category for a project that tackled late coming at their school.
In second place was Dlangezwa Secondary School from KwaZulu-Natal, which focused on introducing a healthy lifestyle in the school, and managed to change the boarding house menu from being dominated by fried food, to a healthy diet of lean meats and vegetables.
Third position went to Northern Cape’s Postmasburg High School for fencing in the graveyard across the road from their school where social ills were running rife.
The programme is a competition where pupils present projects they’ve undertaken to improve a particular problem they’ve identified in or around the school. Topics ranged from social to academic and environmental issues and the participants found creative and innovative solutions to address them.
Over the past weekend in Parys, Free State, provincial winners from all nine provinces were brought together.
The panel of judges included Constitutional Court Judge Edwin Cameron. “It was a great pleasure and quite a privilege to be an adjudicator at the programme national finals. The projects presented by the pupils were inspiring and humbling. And the event itself was bursting with positive, forward-looking energies,” he said.
The top three winning schools in the secondary school category submitted a wish list of what they would do with R10 000, R7 500 or R5 000.
Details: Amanda Blankfield-Koseff from non-governmental organisation Empowervate 079 080 8474.
