READER LETTER | Help pupils with drug problems

Our hard-fought democracy benefited our education system where every learner enjoys Section 29(1) of their constitutional right to basic education.

Our learners spend the better part of their days at basic education institutions with educators entrusted to them for learning and teaching development. Educators should protect learners’ rights, cherish and treat them equally with respect, irrespective of their creed or ethnicity.

Oftentimes our learners in high schools get hooked-up in substance abuse, which eventually affects their academic performance and general behaviour. It should be encouraged that educators should treat such learners with care, they deserve rehabilitation rather than calling them names and treating them like junkies.

Schools should exercise progression policy for such learners instead of keeping them in one grade for more than two years. The rationale behind the progression policy should be to minimise high dropout rate, to being a mockery and to avoid these former substance abuse learners from being demoralised and possibly relapse.

Sadly, my 17-year-old son was treated differently by his educators at Mohloli Maritime Secondary School of Specialisation in Sharpeville, South of Johannesburg. He was refused progression as a former substance abuser and must repeat one grade for the third year after having endured abuse, learner rights violations and mishandling from his educators.

I engaged the school’s appeal board, who showed me the middle finger and arrogantly told me to register my child elsewhere. The learner’s right to basic education was denied by this institution as he remains schoolless.

Mofosi MphutingTshepiso, Sharpeville