15 Oct 2018

The Good Samaritan Foundation has awarded a permanent trophy to Sedumedi Junior Secondary School after they took position one in last year’s Junior Certificate Examination results, beating all other schools in the Kweneng region.

The foundation motivated the school to perform even better in this year’s JC examinations.

Speaking at the victory celebration, Assistant Minister of Youth Empowerment, Sport and Culture Development Mr Dikgang Makgalemele commended the foundation for having found it fit to support and assist schools in their quest to improve education.

Mr Makgalemele urged the foundation to be proud of what they did despite that the school’s performance was not what was expected, but noted that the achievement was worth celebrating and motivated the school to perform better in the next examinations.

The school attained a 39.9 per cent ABC pass rate against the 40 per cent target. The assistant minister however urged the school management to consider improving their results remarkably, saying several factors could be consdered.

He said there should be a plan to succeed, identify challenges and seek solution on how to address them, noting that some of the challenges could be addressed by engaging the private sector or having an active alumni programme.

He also said parents could consider class visits as a way of supporting both learners and teachers so as to get firsthand information on their children’s performance.

For his part, chairperson and founder of the Good Samaritan Foundation Mr Kabo Morwaeng acknowledged that the 39.9 per cent ABC pass rate the school had attained was not as high a grade as one would have expected, but celebrating the efforts was equally important.

He said his foundation had pledged to support the best performing school in the whole of Kweneng region annually, noting that to date the foundation had donated about P180 000 to nine schools in Molepolole.

 Mr Morwaeng hinted that next year the budget could be increased to not less than half a million.

In addition, he said the foundation was looking into conducting workshops to capacitate both teachers and parents on matters of inclusive education, saying the trophy that they had just awarded was not a floating one as they wanted it to remain a symbol of excellence forever to the school.

MP for Molepolole south Dr Tlamelo Mmatli also commended the foundation for supporting education and called on the department of education to find out why schools performed exceptionally well at lower levels and performance dropped at junior schools, an observation he said raised eyebrows.  He nevertheless urged all to take education seriously.

The school head Ms Roselin Bahumi said that they were delighted at the continuous support the school was receiving, particularly from the foundation and other stakeholders. 

However, she said that there were many challenges they were faced with and some of them had direct bearing on poor performance. 

She cited, for instance, that currently the school was an 18-stream as opposed to the original capacity of 12 streams. 

That, she said, had resulted in the learner environment being compromised as some classes were conducted outside. 

Other challenges included shortage of staff accommodation, office space and stationery. ENDS