NEW SCHOOL BUILDING FOR MEETSE LOOKS PROMISING.Meetse a Bophelo primary school in Mamelodi is awaiting the completion of their new school building which is currently under construction and will be used to its full capacity shortly. The hope is that it will improve conditions at the school which is currently overcrowded and whose facilities do not meet acceptable standards.
The new building is almost completely made from steel, and is only the second of it’s kind to be built in South Africa.
The school has between 2000 and 2500 learners, and the new building, sponsored by, and constructed in a joint effort by the government and ArcelorMittal, will breathe a new life into this overcrowded township school.
Maphuti Rammutla, the Head of Department for Natural Sciences, said: “It is going to be wonderful for the school to have this new building, and we are anxious to start using it.”
The new building is a permanent structure with permanent bathrooms. It has a cafeteria where warm meals are prepared for the students, and it has refuge bins of which the contents will be removed and sent away often.
The old buildings are prefabricated classrooms and temporary toilets, which are just little stone compartments and which cannot be cleaned thoroughly. There is no cafeteria and the rubbish is being burned away in a metal bin instead of being disposed of properly. The new building has a much more positive prospect than the old one. The prefabricated classrooms will be moved to a pre designated area where they will accommodate learners who will not go to the new building.
“At the moment, the teacher to student ratio is about 1 to 60, and this makes personal interaction between teachers and students very difficult” said Rammutla.
“The preferable ratio between teachers and students is 1 to 35, and the new building will make this possible.” He added that this is because there is not enough classrooms to accommodate all the teachers at the moment, so some teachers get to many students and some teachers get none. The new building will have enough classrooms so that all the teachers can be used and the students divided equally .
Everyone will benefit from the new building. Each Head of Department, i.e. the person in charge of a subject and the teachers that teach it, will get an office of their own . This will make the planning and creation of new and better learning plans possible. The hope is that this better working environment will have a positive impact on student’s work.
Rammutla said that extra- curricular activities like sport are suffering because of the lack of space. Currently the school is using community grounds for this, but it is up to 4 kilometres away from many students’ place of residence, so many students have no way of getting there. But according to Rammutla, the old school grounds, which currently holds the prefabricated classrooms, can be used for sport.
With the sport grounds so near, the learners will certainly attend practice and matches, and this according to Rammutla is of great importance because sport is important for the development of children.
Rammutla said, “The new building will also have a laboratory, something the old school does not. Learning resources like this is vital, because it will allow for educators to better convey their knowledge to the students.”
The new building can unfortunately not accommodate all the learners. The principal of Meetse, Mr. Patrick Sikhumbana, says that some of the learners will go to the new building, while others will go to the site where the prefabricated classes will be moved.
The decision of where to move who is still under consideration but according to Mr. Sikhumbana, they are leaning towards moving the learners in accordance with the extension in which they live, so that those learners who live near the new building will go to school there, and the learners who live closer to the designated area where the old buildings will be moved will go there.
“Extensions 8, 11, 12 and the RDP zone’s learners will go to the new building, while students from Alaska, Stoffelpoort and Lusaka (other extensions in Mamelodi), will go to the site up the mountain where the prefabricated classrooms are going to be moved” said Sikhumbana. Sikhumbana then said that they have not yet decided which teachers will be moved.
These extensions are part of Mamelodi. Extensions 8-12 and the RDP zone are nearer to the new building, while Alaska, Stoffelpoort and Lusaka are nearer to the site where the prefabricated classrooms will be moved. This placement of students is similar to the old Model C system, when learners where placed in schools according to the erea in which they live.
According to Mr. Sikhumbana, there is a problem. “Every learner and teacher would like to occupy the new building, but it cannot accommodate everyone. The learners going to the prefabricated classrooms will be disappointed , but there is a silver lining. The classes will be smaller, making for a better learning environment, and many of the learners will have to travel a smaller distance from their homes to get there.”
Mr. Sikhumbana said “ One will always be uncomfortable when one has to divide children, but we welcome the divide, because ultimately, everyone will benefit from it in some way or another.”
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