Special, gifted school principal

Tshwarelo Hosia | Monday December 26, 2022 06:00

Schools are littered across the vast expanse of this semi-arid country from Ramatlabama in the south, Ramokgwebana in the north, Gudigwa in the North West to the Kgalagadi sands in the west.

Literally the country boasts of at least one fully-fledged primary school or a satellite primary school at every village. Save for a few areas, most of the schools are within commutable distances.

While our children are guaranteed access to education, the same guarantee cannot be given on matters of quality. Schools doors are wide open and many children do respond to the call to attend school but at the end of the day, many fall by the way side. The school system by default not by design caters for the few.

The affliction, the curse of academic underachievement in public schools, seems to know no boundaries. The curse of failure has general, universal applicability. Both rural and urban schools carry the stigma of failing children and falling short of satisfying required standards of achievement.

However, urban schools fare better while their counterparts at overwhelmingly rural and poverty stricken backgrounds are overwhelmed by academic hurdles. A child in a village school faces a higher risk of unsuccessfully completing or dropping out of school compared to the privileged child in the city school.

The plight of the child schooling in the rural location is compounded by the fact that many staff reluctantly serve in remote and underdeveloped regions. Working in adverse areas with limited amenities keep educators on their toes, with their eyes on the road scouting for opportunities for a possible relocation and redeployment to more developed centres.

High staff turnover leaves the child in the rural areas facing the risk of falling in different hands far too often. Nonetheless, not all is lost. Not all teachers are reluctant to ply their trade in the backwaters of the country. Moved by the spirit of patriotism, a complete devotion to one’s country, some have taken up employment opportunities in rural schools with a sense of love and pride.

To a true patriot, deployment in villages presents itself as an opportunity to make profound positive changes in the lives of children who would otherwise face some uncertain future. Rural schools therefore have far too many odds conspiring to frustrate provision of quality education. But the situation in rural schools can change. Yes, there could be too many problems but certainly such problems are not insurmountable.

Deployment of the right people at the right places and at the right time is one of the many measures that have produced dramatic and miraculous learning outcomes in broken and chronically low achieving schools. I recall vividly that it was in 2016, when a decision was taken to deploy a special and gifted school principal at Lehutshelo Junior Secondary School in Hukuntsi in the Kgalagadi North. The school principal, carefully identified and deployed to the school, was Peggy Maboe.

School principal Maboe is the unsung heroine this column has elected to celebrate in this edition. Maboe may be a very quiet and unassuming educator but her patriotism is deep. She does not make noise but quietly get things done. It seems the authorities did not give her notes on the situation ahead. She took her assignment with little or no knowledge of the difficult terrain she was about to negotiate. If she thought this was an ordinary transfer, she was dead wrong. Little did it occur to her that she was going to be the kingpin of the special operation the ministry had planned to execute. At the time, the school was literally ungovernable and academically one of the worst performing schools in the country. The dismal school’s performance was a source of grave concern to the parents, not least to the chief sponsor - the government. Everything had fallen apart and the centre could not hold. It was a faction riddled school and the warring parties made it difficult for the school to reach a consensus on critical matters. The morale of the staff was at its lowest ebb and this affected instructional matters leaving the poor rural students with a bleak future.

The school was in dire straits and the villagers had grown sick and tired of the status quo and wanted change urgently. I remember very well one kgotla meeting addressed by the then Assistant Minister of Education and Skills Development, Moisereale Master Goya, in which parents took turns to lament the situation in their school. What frustrated them most was that Lehutshelo Junior Secondary School was once the pride of the village, having had an opportunity to sit at the apex. The school that had once dwarfed and outfoxed city schools had now become a shadow of its former self. This was unacceptable in their view. Having listened to the villagers, the minster relayed their concerns to the officials in Gaborone. The response of the officials was swift and immediate. And these are the circumstances under which a special operation was hatched in 2016 to reverse the school’s downward trend.

The special one, Maboe, did not disappoint. With hindsight benefit, she was indeed what the doctor had prescribed for Hukuntsi. Her work in Hukuntsi began in a spectacular way. She holds a rare distinction of perhaps being the only principal who started her work at the Kgotla. I have no recollection in my entire teaching career of 30 years of any principal who had to be launched at a kgotla meeting before commencement of assignment. She was launched by the minister at a fully attended kgotla, the very kgotla that had called for a change of guard at the school.

In launching the principal together with her new Deputy, Senewa Mokotedi, the minister confidently said to the villagers, “you asked for a solution and now I have brought the solution”. The school was transitioning from being a male driven to a female driven school. Principal Maboe was presented as a high profile problem solver. There was no but or if, she was there to succeed.

The possibility of failure was ruled out because failure was not an option. The kgotla meeting again with the benefit of hindsight set the tone for the work ahead. Principal Maboe together with her partner in crime, the dependable Mokotedi hit the ground running. The first port of call was to win the confidence of staff and redirect their energies to the purpose of the school. It took meetings and several intense engagements with various actors in the school to build synergy and a common language bringing the disparate elements together. Indeed they succeeded in collapsing factions and created one school with one purpose out of the many warring mini schools that prevailed before a change of guard.

Petty squabbles in a school have an adverse effect on learning outcomes. And the incessant battles in the school had taken away the thunder from the instructional core, the very thing which defines the school. Teaching was in disarray and the teachers did not bring their best selves to the classroom.

And Maboe, the school’s newly found Terramycin, brought some sense of urgency to the school. She set priorities right and made classroom instruction the epicentre of the school’s activities. Her efforts paid dividends. After one year in 2017 she achieved a value addition of seven percent. By any standards seven percent is a big and dramatic jump. She did not stop there because the upward mobility continued in 2018 with a rise of 11%. Her secret of success was that she got the whole village including sister government departments to rally behind her cause. She engaged traditional authorities and villagers as much as she did engage government departments. Parental engagement did wonders to the school. Parents developed a keen interest in the school and volunteered their labour and resources to bring order and discipline.

Parents could no longer allow children to roam the streets during school time because the principal had shared her vision with them. Government departmental heads too played their part to fix the broken school. They placed their resources especially photocopiers at the disposal of the school.