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The teacher that has been suspended following the alleged racist incident involving Grade R pupils at Laerskool Schweizer-Reneke in the North West has said she will not go down without a fight.
Addressing the media in Centurion on Tuesday afternoon, an emotional Elana Barkhuizen said she was determined to get her job back.
Barkhuizen took a photo of her class last week, and sent it to a parents’ WhatsApp group. The photo, which soon went viral, showed what appeared to be a distinct separation of black and white pupils. Following complaints by a parent in the group, and a public outcry, Barkhuizen was suspended.
She said that she was not the teacher who had separated the students, and would fight the North West department of basic education’s decision to suspend her.
Speaking in Afrikaans, she said that she was a good teacher and that she thanked those who had supported her.
“I owe it to my own class, my colleagues and every child in South Africa who needs good teachers. We dare not allow these people who have spread hate to create doubt in teachers’ minds. Teachers are perhaps the only source of love and support for so many children, and teachers are some of the most important figures in children’s lives. I will not allow those children to be deprived of good teachers,” she said.
She also said that she was prepared to fight to clear her name.
“Do not be sorry for me – I will not surrender. I will fight. I will make sure that what happened to me will never happen to any other teacher. I owe it to my own class, my colleagues and every child in South Africa who needs good teachers.”
Trade union Solidarity, who has joined forces with Barkhuizen to defend her suspension and have her reinstated at the school said on Tuesday that the suspension was “unlawful”. Barkhuizen was employed by the school governing body and not by the department of basic education.
“The school governing body hasn’t given her anything of substance about her suspension. She still has no idea why she has been suspended. That is why it is unlawful,” said Solidarity chief executive Dirk Hermann.
Hermann said that the children were separated according to their language and that they were later integrated into the classroom.
Solidarity’s head of legal services, Anton van der Bijl, said that they would be filing an urgent application to have the suspension lifted.
Meanwhile the SAOU teachers’ union also joined the call for Barkhuizen to be reinstated, saying that labour law procedures were not followed.
The North West education department’s spokesperson Freddy Sepeng told News24 that more heads could roll at if the department’s investigations showed that others were to blame for separating children by race.
Attempts to get comments from the department about Solidarity’s case were unsuccessful at the time of publication.
