The excessively high number of students and lack of classrooms make the teaching program not going in a normal and appropriate way at Khulani Junior Primary School, Maphetheni, Nanda.
This was revealed by a reliable source who knows everything that happens in this school, it turns out that we have five classrooms since we end up in Grade 4, which causes an unsatisfactory complexity when it’s time to study.
“The law of the Ministry of Education clearly states that a room and a classroom must have only 30 to 40 students. But for this school, it is very difficult as there are rooms with more than 71 students, while in others there are even more than 90, which causes traffic,” said the source.
Continuing, he said that one of the reasons why the work of the teachers was so difficult is that they cannot even relax as they do not have their own room, which forces them to stay in the classrooms from morning until sunset.
“It is scary that even the principal doesn’t even have his own office, which forces him to use the guard’s house at the school gate to do his other daily tasks. All this worries us as a community, and the teachers are also not satisfied to work in such a situation, especially because this matter has been reported to the Department of Education in the province many times but there is no difference,” the source said.
It has been reported that even if there are parent meetings, the principal is forced to put up a tent that will be enough for all the parents because the school rooms will not accommodate them all as there is no hall for such programs.
“It is a bad and unbearable situation, we wish that something happens because this school is very useful to the community because it was built close to the community and we make it easy for people to send their children to study there,” he said.
The source lamented that they have been waiting for a long time in the hope that things will be okay, as it has happened several times in the past that people came to check the situation, they promised to come back to fix it but never came back.
Mrs. Nokukhanya Makhoba who lives in the area, who has been on the committee that controls the operation of the school for more than 10 years, admitted that the condition of the school is getting worse and worse mainly because every year the number of students who will study in it increases, which means an increase in the burden and pressure on the teachers.
“We wish that at least mobile classrooms can be found to ease the burden on the teachers who are responsible for teaching a large number of children crowded in one place. And that alone is a situation that can be dangerous for the children’s health to gather in a place where you can’t even breathe well, especially since the sun is so hot these days,” said Mrs. Makhoba.
Iof the country tried several times to contact the spokesperson for the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education, Mr. Muzi Mahlambi, but his phone could not be picked up for almost four days and he did not respond to the messages sent to him on his WhatsApp, although it appears that he had read them.