January 12, 2005
By Sheree Russouw
WHEN the teachers at Iterele Zenzele High near Diepsloot opened their school's doors to start the new school year on Wednesday, they found many of their classrooms almost completely flooded from Johannesburg's recent heavy storms.
It's not how principal Eddie Mathibeli wanted to start the 2005 school year. After all, the Gauteng department of education has already classified his overcrowded school as the school that is most desperate for resources in Johannesburg's northern suburbs.
"But what can we do? It looks like a small tsunami has hit us, but we have to make the best of the worst," Mathibeli says from his makeshift office - his has been soaked - in a derelict classroom.
This room, it seems, is a mirror of many of the school's classrooms. No electricity. No door. Rotting ceilings. Only empty plug sockets where there were once computers - they were all stolen last year.
Outside his window, throngs of parents queue on the school's overgrown lawn. They failed to register their children for the new school year in time for the October 2004 deadline.
Now, parents like Anna Gonde, are clearly worried about their children's future education. She has been waiting outside the school gates since 6am, hoping that the cramped school will accept her child this year.
"I don't know what I'll do if they don't take my child," Gonde says, as she clutches her 16-year-old daughter's schoolbooks.
"Maybe I can send my daughter to night school. But there are no schools here - except for the rich. It's not good for a 16-year-old girl to sit at home and do nothing."
The provincial education department has already warned that those parents who failed to meet the October deadline may be forced to send their children to schools it has selected for them.
"These parents come with all kind of stories about why they didn't register their children. When we tell them to come, they don't. We can't make them come register.
"Now it seems that we are cruel that we tell them we can't take them. But we've just started the year and already we don't have space."
With more than 1 200 pupils, space is at a premium here. The school, it seems, is literally bursting at its seams.
Most of its impoverished learners live in informal settlements scattered across Johannesburg from areas like Diepsloot and Zeverfontein. And many parents can't afford to pay the R200 school fees each year.
Says Mathibeli: "We just pack the children in our classes. Although a teacher pupil ratio of one teacher to 45 pupils is the ideal, we hardly have that here.
Sometimes we stack them [pupils] in one teacher to 70 pupils.
What else can we do? When you have so many learners, it's just not possible for our teachers to give them individual attention and their school performance suffers."
The education department has sent 126 mobile classrooms to overcrowded schools across Gauteng. It promised to give Iterele Zenzele six mobile classrooms at the start of the school year, but the school is still waiting.
The race for space at his school is so desperate that some teachers are forced to teach classes in tin containers, which economics teacher Lindiwe Mothutsi says it gets unbearably hot in summer and freezing in winter.
"As a teacher and as the pupils those kinds of unsatisfactory conditions really affect your attention span at school.
"It's also very difficult to have such big classes. If as a teacher, you don't have classroom management skills, you'll never make it. Some of these kids can be real bullies."
Overcrowding, she says, destabilises the quality of education that his teachers can deliver as it's not possible for overworked teachers to monitor the progress of individual children.
Mathibeli blames the school's poor matric performance last year on overcrowding.
"Before I came to this school, it had a 20 percent matric pass rate. Two years ago, this improved to 80 percent. But we keep on getting fuller and last year we only had a 56 percent matric pass rate."
The education department concedes that the school "needs much more resources than we can provide". But it says it plans to deliver the mobile classrooms in the next few days.
Mathibeli is still optimistic that his school will turn the tide. "We are willing and highly motivated to do our work and are prepared to face the challenges. Like I said, we just have to make the best out of the worst."
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