Section 24(1)(a) of the South African Schools Act (SASA) 84 of 1996 in attempting to enforce cooperative governance in schools, promulgated that parents should be part of the education of their children. As promising as this reform may appear, it is a source of discomfort as most SGB members are not well trained to uphold the new demand of change. This paper reports on the findings of a study aimed at unraveling the operational dilemmas caused by the assigned responsibilities to SGBs in establishing school-based management systems in schools. This is done with the intention to empower SGBs to undertake their assigned responsibilities effectively. Underpinned by a qualitative descriptive research approach, document analysis and interviews in a case study research were used to collect data from 40 purposefully selected SGB members from 2 schools in the Mmabatho Area Office. Data collected were analysed through open coding. The findings revealed that although SGBs are conversant of their allotted responsibilities and are willing to execute them, the operational structures of the SGBs inhibit those who constitute the majority from doing so. SGBs are only allowed to undertake certain allocated functions if they are skilled enough to do so. Yet, nothing is done to skill them to do that. This means they are indirectly handicapped to undertake those functions and the offer to do so is ‘window dressing’. It is argued that if SGBs are to undertake their functions effectively in a school based management system, they should be assigned functions according to their ability to do so in a participative management system. It is therefore recommended that alongside providing further training to SGBs, the operational structures for SGBs should be revised to empower every SGBs member to function in accordance with the provisions of SASA (24)(1)(a) and according to their abilities.

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