THE deplorable working conditions at Sizalendaba Secondary School in Khami district, Bulawayo province, have been blamed for chasing away teachers from the institution.
Sizalendaba school was established in 2012 but classroom and accommodation shortages have seen teachers shunning the school citing poor working conditions.
The school’s intolerable situation was highlighted at the Bulawayo province development committee meeting held at Mhlahlandlela Government Complex recently.
School development committee chairperson, Zwenyika Murapa-Moyo, confirmed the situation in an interview with Southern Eye yesterday, adding that the school was in dire situation which needed urgent attention.
“It is a council school inherited from the community and the only two blocks available were constructed by the society with material donated by non-governmental organisations,” Murapa-Moyo said.
“The teachers stay in Cowdray Park and due to incapacitation, which they always complain about and being mugged last year in October on their way to school as the area is bushy, some left and this does not spare the learners also.”
Murapa-Moyo said the two classroom blocks accommodate four classes.
“We have so many learners and that is why there is need to construct more classroom blocks.
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“The school has no electricity, no laboratories for practical science, let alone a football pitch, when it is a council school that we believe has the machinery to do such tasks,” Murapa-Moyo added.
He said the school was also affected by shortage of teachers.
“We no longer have building as a technical subject as the teacher left and was never replaced. The last mathematics teacher came during the third term and to our surprise, when we opened schools this year, she had left,” Murapa-Moyo said.
Primary and Secondary Education ministry spokesperson Taungana Ndoro said the school was not the only one in such a predicament in Zimbabwe.
“Do you know that we have over 10 516 schools in Zimbabwe? We plan development at a national scale, we do not plan for Sizalendaba alone.
“We have other schools like Hurungwe Secondary School in Mutoko, and we pick all issues. Whatever it is that you may have heard, we are not picking one school over all the schools that we have, it is not Sizalendaba alone with such issues,” he said.
