The Sunday News
Kudzai Chikiwa, Sunday News Reporter
THE headache of every parent is the safety of their children. With many cases of child trafficking and kidnapping, it has been a boiling issue at Kumalo Primary School in Bulawayo on how to keep their learners safe.
“Kumalo is a second name and we as teachers are the parents and custodians of our children. We have been carrying this burden for long trying to figure out how our students may be safe.
“Luckily, the School Development Committee came to our rescue and bought us a 66-seater bus for our students,” said Mrs Stella Mhlanga, the school headmistress.
The SDC purchased a bus and donated it to the school and everyone is excited about it. The bus carries learners to and from the city centre every day.
“Our pupils are safe as they are picked and dropped at the City Hall in town. Parents also do not need to drive all the way to school as they can wait for their children in town.
“Educational tours are also easy because we no longer need to hire buses,” she said.
The bus also helps in raising funds for the school to supplement the school treasury as pupils pay some fares to use the bus, she said.
The school also has significant development that is underway.
They constructed an additional ECD block which makes a complement of five classrooms and is now functional.
The school play centre has since been fenced and upgraded.
Additional equipment was purchased and the old apparatus were repaired.
The school has graduated from the ancient way of clocking out as it purchased a biometric machine.
The school used the rehabilitation funds effectively by painting the rest of the school, re-tiling the school hall, rewiring the main block and replacing light bulbs with fluorescent tubes.
They purchased a generator so that computer lab and office equipment would be functional at all times despite power cuts.
They put in place white boards in eleven classrooms. The school drilled a second borehole and equipped it for greening of the sports fields.
