Community leaders in the Abiem East section of Northern Bahr el Ghazal State’s Aweil East County say the community schools are staffed mainly by volunteer teachers because they do not have the money to recruit and pay trained teachers.
Former Aweil East County Commissioner Mou Kuan said in an interview on Saturday that they held a meeting with the state minister of education during which they shared with him issues that they would be liked to be addressed by the state administration and their development partners.
“We told him that most community schools were manned by volunteer teachers who lacked the basic skills to teach. We also discussed lack of learning spaces and the need to help repair those that needs to be repaired,” he said.
He added that apart from untrained teachers, the critical shortage of teaching and learning materials and very poor school infrastructure had a negative impact on the quality of learning.
“Most of the serving volunteer teachers are either paid in-kind, or receive a minimal wage, depending on what the community can afford. This means that they leave when a better opportunity arises and community schools are subjected to a high level of instability which has a negative impact on the learning of children,” he said.
Kuan explained that although the government had indicated its intention to support community schools, there was need for more effort if the community schools were to produce quality pupils.
“We know very well that quite a number of community schools around the country have been assisted with trained teachers and are on government payroll. However, there is still a long road to go to integrate community schools into the mainstream education system,” he said.
The official further pointed out that a number of measures should be taken to improve the learning environment for the school-going children.
“One of these is a provision of a symbolic stipend for volunteer community school teachers in recognition of the work they do. During one of the annual gatherings in the area on community schools held in 2014, various stakeholders made a proposal of 500 a month to support each teacher in the community,” he recalled.
He said another measure was to set up a bursary scheme for community school teachers, to allow those who had minimum qualifications to access colleges of education and undergo professional teachers training, in line with government standards and regulations.
He urged the Ministry of Education to take interest in community schools by monitoring to ensure learning was actually taking place and to support volunteer teachers with short term professional development programmes.