Dear Sadtu, make some sums for ‘Comrade Angie’

Dear SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu), on 6 October you turn 32. You are not a child anymore.

Since your founding, you have worked your socks off to become the most potent teacher collective in SA.

There was even a time your erstwhile secretary-general, Willy Madisha, was president of Cosatu. You guys rock!

When you want change, it happens. One does not need to look further than your bargaining power. I hear your members earn good money because, regardless of your crucial role in moulding fragile minds, you still refuse to be designated an essential service.

You love your right to strike.

Sometimes I wonder why you don’t want such a distinguished label – essential service; which would suggest without you things don’t move. Imagine being identified with police, soldiers and nurses. Look, in the past two years, I have been fortunate to work intimately with both primary and high schools.

I’m often involved in school policy-making. It’s been a blessing to experience the frustration of teachers with the Bill of Rights and education legislation they are expected not to question.

I must confess, some of the roles they play are beyond them. Primary school teachers are expected to often be the parent who is absent at home. They regularly deal with pupils who come to school smelling of stale urine; wearing shirts with dirty collars, missing buttons, torn socks and worn-out school shoes.

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Some walk barefoot. In winter, some come to school not dressed for the season. When teachers ask, the problem is usually domestic.

It is an unspeakable problem. A tearjerker. A problem a pupil will not tell a teacher; one a teacher is not trained to solve. As a result, unstable children drop out of school and become society’s eternal liabilities. They become those kids you meet at the street corner, either asking for money or pointing a gun and demanding your car.

They are the reason you left the “hood for the ’burbs”. Whenever a pupil knifes or shoots a teacher, as we have witnessed in Gauteng, we believe hashtags will solve the problem. We bury our heads, like Americans refusing to confront gun violence and we point to everything except the elephant in the room.

Your members are expected to deal with pregnant teenagers. In policymaking workshops, school governing bodies and school management teams (SMT) vent frustrations with teaching nauseous girls.

SMTs end up suggesting parents should babysit their pregnant brood because parents shift parenting to teachers – some not yet parents themselves. Recently, their suggestion is that social workers should be placed in every school.

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Every public school should have a resident social worker to whom pupils will confide who impregnates them, who dresses them in dirty uniforms and who sends them to school hungry.

Social workers should be a key component of the SMT so that children, who schooling might overwhelm, can be salvaged before they quit and burden the fiscus.

Dear Sadtu, you are capable of miracles. There are other teacher unions but they are not alchemists like you. Aren’t you the only ones who address the basic education minister as “Comrade Angie”?

Now here’s what you can do.

Demand government place social workers at a ratio of one for every 250 pupils. Threaten that you will down tools before examinations because you are tired of being unpaid social workers. Tell your Comrade Angie if she doesn’t hire social workers you will withdraw your support to her political party, come 2024.

And here’s a catch; if “Comrade Angie” obliges and 52 000 social workers are placed in schools you might as well recruit them to Sadtu; not Nehawu. With 52 000 new signings, your voice in the Alliance will become louder. Either way, you win.

– Mashego is political analyst.

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