New perspective

Last week, Principal Dyani and I met with an organization called Friends of Walmer. Essentially, this is a group of local community members who support Walmer High School financially and otherwise. The meeting was fascinating as I learned about the different needs of the school community that I was unaware of (since most of my knowledge to this point is contained to the progress of the library). The biggest issue is the ‘quintile system’. Public schools here are ranked 1-5 based on affluence: 1 being the poorest of communities, and 5 being the most affluent. In previous school years Walmer has been ranked as a Quintile 5 school because of its location right on the border of Walmer Township and the Walmer suburb. See it on the map here (the schools Afrikaans name is Vernon Gamanda). You can see behind the school, the sea of intertwining roads of the township. Literally across the street are long blocks with big beautiful houses. Being ranked as a Quintile 5 school, Walmer was being denied hundreds of thousands of rands of government funding each year. At the end of the 2011 school year, they were re-evaluated and named a Quintile 3 school. This was a huge success, and means a lot more funding and support for the school- but not until April 1. In the meantime, the school is stuck with dilemmas such as how to feed a large population of students that needs it. A feeding program funded by the government will be part of the transition into the Quintile 3 school (as most true Quintile 5 schools do not have much need for a feeding program), but that doesn’t begin until April 1. In the meantime, the school is depending on inconsistent donations from local grocery stores. There are the additional challenges of no dining hall, no gym, no science labs, and no computer labs for the students. Under the “new norms” of the Department of Education, this will all be provided once they are officially acknowledged as a Quintile 3 school, but even still, they have many schools of higher priority to them (the Quintile 1 and 2s) that will get that sort of development first. It puts Walmer in a predicament because they obviously want to renovate their spaces to create better facilities if they can find funding, yet don’t want to pay for a project the district will eventually pay for. It was great to see Walmer High through a different lens. Since Alice and I spend most of our time in the library, we are not often exposed to these other challenges the school faces. It certainly put into perspective how little our library "needs" are compared to the overall needs of the school, and made me feel so fortunate to have the bit of technology that we do!