Six overcrowded schools in and around Grahamstown will receive new classrooms this month.
Mary Waters High School and Ntaba Maria are among those to benefit from 225 new pre-fabricated classrooms being given to 58 schools in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro and Cacadu districts in the current financial year.
Six overcrowded schools in and around Grahamstown will receive new classrooms this month.
Mary Waters High School and Ntaba Maria are among those to benefit from 225 new pre-fabricated classrooms being given to 58 schools in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro and Cacadu districts in the current financial year.
The move is an effort by the Eastern Cape Department of Education, in partnership with the Department of Public Works, to ease overcrowding in schools.
The education department's Grahamstown district director Amos Fetsha said on Tuesday they appreciated the help. "We are ever grateful to our government for responding to help our schools. [Overcrowding] at our schools was a problem, but now at least this problem is [being]addressed," Fetsha said.
At Mary Waters High School, Fetsha said, five classrooms had been completed but had yet to be handed over by public works; Ntaba Maria were getting seven classrooms – six had been completed.
Outside Grahamstown, Bathurst Primary School had got two classrooms, Alexandria Primary School three, Port Alfred Primary School six and Shenston farm school would be getting two.
Fetsha said the department of public works would officially hand over the classrooms to the schools when they were all completed.
The education department had agreed to provide the prefabricated classrooms because of serious overcrowding in the schools, Fetsha said.
The department has an infrastructure programme and these classrooms are given to schools that have overcrowding problems, schools that are dilapidating and need renovations.
"Schools are prioritised depending on the need. Mary Waters is flooded with learners every year and they needed more classrooms," Fetsha said.
When a school was dilapidated, however, and the number of pupils was shrinking each year they would not allocate new structures, Fetsha said.
"As a department we welcome the… infrastructure intervention from the public and government institutions," said provincial education spokesperson Malibongwe Mtima. "We always say that education is a societal matter; we need society to contribute immensely to change the lives of the ordinary learners."
Mtima said they welcomed the support by the department of public works, because it was meeting the education department half way in addressing infrastructure backlogs.
