Pupils at the Petamukanda Primary School in Madombidzha village are still being taught in overcrowded classrooms because of the lack of infrastructure. The school has a shortage of educators, chairs and desks.
Limpopo Mirror visited the school on Monday and discovered that at least four pupils are sharing a desk. The representative of the parents, Ms Selinah Mukwevho, said that overcrowding in classrooms continued to affect the pupils' ability to focus. "It's summer now and very hot here in the village," she said. "We have visited the school and pupils look sleepy and tired as it gets excessively hot in the classroom. We request the department to intervene."
The DA's provincial spokesperson on education, Jacques Smalle, visited Petamukanda Primary School during the party's "oversight visit" to schools and discovered that the school had an enrollment of 1 095 learners who all shared 14 classrooms. There are 27 educators for all those pupils. In one classroom, the party counted 135 learners.
Smalle said that the kind of overcrowding found at Petamukanda was unacceptable and against the department of education's learner-to-educator ratio (LER).
"The department's learner-to-educator ratio states clearly that no more than 40 learners per classroom is allowed," he said. He stated that more schools in the province were experiencing a problem similar to that of Petamukanda.
So far, the DA has already written to the Portfolio Committee of Education, requesting that a comprehensive report be compiled. "The DA urges the Limpopo MEC for Education, Ishmael Kgetjepe, to urgently intervene in this crisis by providing mobile classrooms, chairs and desks as an interim measure to address overcrowding," Smalle said.
The spokesperson for the Department of Education, Dr Naledzani Rasila, admitted that the department was experiencing problems with a lack of infrastructure in most schools. "The school in question is not the only affected school," he said. "We have put in place an infrastructure programme where we are building new schools, and renovate and fix specific problems in schools," he said. "We work in line with our programme and a specific budget, so we are unable to tell you as to when a problem in a particular school will be addressed."
Rasila urged schools to submit reports on all infrastructure needs to circuit offices, who would then forward them to the district for attention.