Belle Primary School in Orlando West has no library, inadequate teaching staff, no staff room, too few classrooms and desks. It recently merged with Tlhoreng School and this month a name will be brainstormed for the new school.
Belle is one of eight schools in District 12 in Soweto that had to be merged to avoid wasting resources, according to the Gauteng department of education. This is ironic and bemusing given the fact that Belle is under-resourced.
The school grounds are bleak and dusty with no lawn or flowerbeds, the desks are old and scratched and there are 42 children in one class. Government stipulates that there should be a maximum of 40 children per class.
But there is a sense of enthusiasm for learning, and hope for the future. The classrooms have brightly coloured posters, maps of the world, collages on human rights, and hand-painted pine cones on the windowsills. Many of the children who are learning geometry have smiles on their faces as they engage confidently with the maths teacher. Their hands shoot up to provide answers on how to make a flat roof.
How does such incongruity — the bleak surrounds and the enthusiastic learner — happen? It’s the pride and passion for teaching and learning that accounts for the atmosphere at the school, says Adelaide Thipe, who has been a teacher at Belle for 21 years. She receives notes from the children saying, ‘I love you ma’am. I am who I am because of your input.” Thipe won’t leave the school for this reason, as these are the rewards that make teaching worthwhile. ‘Here we have so many hats: teacher, nurse, role model, social worker, mentor, police officer, nurse, mom, father, friend, psychologist and more.
‘When I go home to my three children there is nothing left of me. My grade two child says to me, ‘mom you no longer care for us’. I say, ‘just give me some time to breathe.’ You can’t disappoint these children, you make the best of an impossible situation. Of all the different things we could have done we chose this, to teach, and it touches your soul that they really want to learn,” she says.
Her story of the emotionally difficult environment she is teaching in is confirmed by a group of 10 girls who all wanted to tell their story to the Teacher. Eight are orphans. One girl says: ‘My mother died of TB, my father died of pneumonia, and I live with my cousins.” No adults? ‘No, no adults”. Another girl says: ‘My parents abandoned me, I don’t think they care where I am and where I live and what I do.”
Thipe says that when a learner says ‘I love you” to a teacher, that child is actually saying ‘I want to be loved by you in return”. This love must be provided. ‘When the child sends me a note saying, ‘I wish you were my mom’, I ask, ‘Who is your mom?’ I find out the mom is dead.”
Thipe says the everyday challenges at a township school are enormous: textbooks are insufficient and never delivered on time; there is a lack of parental involvement where parents exist; there are no netball courts, no soccer ground, no cricket pitch; inadequate toilet facilities; no library; and insufficient stationery.
Yet the attendance at the school is outstanding, the teachers say, because of the dedication and commitment to learning from both the learners and the educators.
Another teacher, Mandisa Matlhoko proudly shows off her learners’ history and geography books. They are neatly covered in brown paper and plastic, and it is clear that their work has been carried out with pride. The children’s spelling is easily on par with learners of the same age at more privileged schools.
Belle teachers say they are grateful and lucky to have the support of Redhill School in Sandton, which provides material and professional support to the school. It is one of the private school’s outreach projects in the greater Johannesburg area.
Belle inspires and shows hope for the future. The government has allocated the biggest slice of the budget to education — in March Finance Minister Trevor Manuel announced in his budget speech that education would receive R105,5-billion. However, the day after the speech, in an interview with the SABC, Manuel admitted that the government’s administrative systems were weak: ‘It’s not a money problem, it’s a management problem.”
This is an almost euphemistic way of putting it. In February, a month after the school year had commenced, a heart-breaking sight was seen on television: thousands of textbooks had been left abandoned in warehouses because the transport wasn’t available to deliver them to the schools.
Belle is proof that with love, pride and commitment to education, we can succeed. It is a case of what a stunning success story South Africa could be, if the management of resources and skills were in place so that children at this school, who have the passion and hunger for education, can actually fly.