adminEducation is one of the pillars that a country’s development hinges on and access to educational facilities can actually be used as a measure of development.
The country has scored many achievements since independence in 1980 in the field of education with many schools having been built by the Government and more still being built. The objective has always been to improve the quality of education, and also improve access by reducing the distance to schools while also providing adequate learning materials.
The gap between rural and urban schools, though narrowed in some cases, especially in the case of boarding schools, has in some instances widened with technology having passed many rural schools by.
In our previous edition we carried a story of Sizalendaba Secondary School, that continues to produce poor results due to a lack of resources. We learn that the council-run school was built by the International Organisation for Migration in the surrounding Hyde Park area before it was handed over to the Bulawayo City Council.
What is clear, however, is that the environment for teaching staff at the school is far from ideal. The school is situated in a peri-urban area with high levels of poverty and hence it does not generate much in terms of fees and other contributions from the community.
Due to failure by the school to provide decent accommodation for teachers, staff turnover has been quite high leading to the poor results witnessed at the school for several years now.
The situation at the school has been brought to light due to the fact that it now falls under the Bulawayo City Council. However, it is our view that there are many other schools around the country that are in similar or even worse conditions than that of Sizalendaba.
We believe as we mark 43 years of independence, the rural folk, that bore the brunt of the liberation struggle, should also fully enjoy the gains of independence by having schools that deliver through having adequate support in terms of resources.
We can never expect children that attend most rural day schools to compete against their urban counterparts when it comes to results when they have limited or no access to online learning resources and resourced laboratories.
Authorities need to bridge that gap without further delay to halt the migration of learners from rural to urban schools, together with the educators that prefer urban settings due to the better living and working conditions there.
It is not a failure of the likes of Sizalendaba when children perform poorly but the collective failure of policymakers and governing authorities to proffer solutions to the problem of allocation of resources, whereby poor communities are seemingly neglected while schools from better communities leverage on the might of their better resourced communities. Let us save our rural schools, and save our rural scholars, and serve our rural communities better. They also have a right to quality education.
mbulelo smpofu
shloboe boe
