School e-rate benefits not happening

By Paul Vecchiatto, ITWeb Cape Town correspondent

Johannesburg, 17 Nov 2008

No public schools and only nine further education and training (FET) colleges are currently benefiting from the school e-rate, the 50% discount they are supposed to receive for their Internet connectivity, the Ministry of Education says.

This information has come to light in a reply to a Parliamentary question posed by Democratic Alliance (DA) MP Paul Swart to education minister Naledi Pandor earlier this year. The DA received the reply last week.

Swart's question was in two parts, and asked how many schools and FET colleges, as defined in the relevant laws, were benefiting from the e-rate in 2006, 2007 and this year.

In the reply, the answer was that currently no schools are benefiting from the e-rate, and that eight FET colleges in KwaZulu-Natal, namely: Coastal, Esayidi, Mnambithi Mthashana, Majuba, Thekwini, Umgungundhlovu, Elangeni, and Richtek, are receiving the discount. The Port Elizabeth FET College is the only institution in the Eastern Cape receiving the e-rate discount.

Bogged down

Communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri stated in her “liberalisation announcement” of September 2004 that schools were entitled to receive the 50% discount. However, the promulgation became bogged down in a bureaucratic process of describing exactly what the e-rate was, exactly what schools are entitled to it and how it should be calculated.

The Universal Services and Access Agency of SA told Parliament earlier this year that a major problem of implementing the e-rate was what it actually meant. The agency said it was not clear if the e-rate referred to the actual modems, or other equipment needed to connect a school to the Internet, or the actual monthly cost, or all of it.

In May last year, Telkom said it is providing the 50% discount rate to 1 300 public schools and all FET colleges, as defined by their relevant laws, which have applied to the company for the e-rate discount.

DA communications spokesperson Dene Smuts describes the education minister's answer as “another show of the Department of Communications' (DOC) pathetic attempts at formulating ICT policy”.

During the DOC annual report briefing to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications last week, Smuts asked DOC director-general Lyndall Shope-Mafole to give an update on the e-rate and at whose cost it was being carried.

Shope-Mafole did not answer the question directly, but indicated that the DOC was now asking for the e-rate to be zero rated, meaning schools would not be charged at all.

“With all SA's resources, we have no excuses for not affording our children all the opportunities they need at school to be able to prepare themselves properly for the future,” Smuts says.

She says in a country with one of the highest telecommunication costs in the world (as a direct result of the policies of the Ministry of Communications), a significant reduction in Internet costs would have made all the difference to struggling schools.

“So poor schools, where children are already at a significant disadvantage, are the biggest losers in this policy failure,” Smuts says.

Years of waffle

According to Smuts, the e-rate was first promised in November 2001, in a document entitled Strategy for Information and Communication Technology in Education. Since then a succession of unfulfilled promises has followed.

Matsepe-Casaburri stated in her budget speech, in June 2004: “From the beginning of the [2005] school year, public schools will be charged only 50% of the normal rate for their Internet calls.” But the legislation allowing this to happen was signed into law one year later, in May 2006.

“But clearly they have not done so, because, two-and-a-half years since then, this reply shows the policy remains virtually dead in the water. The ministers involved need to explain why this critical policy intervention has failed,” Smuts says.

A Telkom spokesperson says his company would be unable to reply today because of the release of its interim results. Replies were still being awaited from the Departments of Communication and Education.