Empowerment of educators in the implementation of school safety measures

The main aim of the study was to find out how educators are empowered to implement safety measures in selected publichigh schools in the Alfred Nzo East Education District, Eastern Cape, South Africa. The study was motivated by multiple mediareports about incidents that threatened the safety of learners especially in rural public schools and how educators are empowered todeal with such incidents. This case study was grounded on qualitative research principles. The study was theoretically guided by theprinciples of the Street-Level Bureaucracy (SLB) and Rational Decision-Making Model. The data was collected from three public highschools in the Alfred Nzo East Education District, Eastern Cape. A purposive sampling technique was utilized to choose the researchparticipants. A total of four educators and one principal were involved in semi-structured interviews. Interviews were supplementedwith short observations and document analysis. The findings of the research include the following: the measures are not implementedproperly. The piloted school had no school-based safety policies which can serve as a guide for educators in ensuring. It was alsoestablished that educators are not empowered to implement safety policies. The researcher recommended that there should beempowerment programmes on school safety management on continuous basis for all the in-service educators twice a year. Theresearcher further proposed that the training programmes that are provided by institutions of higher learning for pre-service teachersmust have multiple law-related modules to provide insight to the novice educators.