President Yoweri Museveni took a brave decision to close schools, we request he close eyes, brave and take a solomanic decision to open the entire school system not only the partial bit of it for the reasons below;
1. Opening for candidates is a burden to schools because the candidates alone can’t facilitate the school expenses.
The school runs extra expenses which remain constant regardless of the numbers which can only be evenly handled when all students are in school.
2. Payments of support staff and group employees whose salaries remain constant like the nurses, secretaries, cooks, cleaners and many more remains a burden to the entire schools’ setting.
3. Your Excellency, services like mooing, Internet, water pumps’ repairing, electricity for classes and dormitory are all constant and their expenses can only be well managed if they are evenly distributed in the students enrollment. Only if candidates are request to pay higher than expected, the schools may not run their budgets well.
4. Your Excellency, much as students can be distanced in classrooms, its still tricky to have them spaced in the dormitory, at Dinning, assembly and in the sporting activities unless the said is not at all considered.
5. Many teacher traveled upcountry and many come from districts which are at the FRONTLINE of the war some with their families yet they teach candidate classes. Your excellence how are they going to move to these schools to adhere to the preparations towards reopening of schools and don’t you think their stations will stigmatize them as suspects?
6. Your Excellency, most of the teachers are also parents. Some are even single parents, widows, widowers and guardians. How will they go to teach at the same time while conducting home schooling?
7. Given the social distancing guidelines, a class of about 60 candidates will require students to be split in about 6 rooms each with about 10-15 students yet they are all meant to be taught by the same teacher at the same time. Teachers won’t be able to have themselves attend 6 streams at ago or schools can’t manage increasing on the human resource.
8. Some schools have foreign students who are from our neighbouring countries yet they are in candidates. Kindly have them considered for they are our country’s’ resource and needed to be in school.
9. We are opening schools to prepare for students towards UNEB. Teaching goes hand in hand with assessment. We can never teach without assessing unless UNEB is to vanish. The president need to be briefed that exams are part of the teaching process and that it’s not a wastage of time. Mr. Dan Odong should different his relevancy
10. Many parents are in poverty right now given the lockdown in which many have even been laid off from work. Unless its proven that candidates are in homes of parents who are not affected. Very few parents will be able to provide for their needs and still many candidates will be left behind the arrangement.
We request the president and the ministry of education to give enough time to have all students report back to school.
UNEB can even be done in January and Feb next year.
Analysed by Mwalim Solomon Bbumba
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