For one Cape Town school on the Cape Flats, this is what schooling and learning could look like – in freshly painted technicolour – under the Covid-19 lockdown Level 3.
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Last week, the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) issued a long, exhaustive explanation of steps schools need to put in place to prepare to receive their first returning Grades 7 and 12 on Monday, 1 June.
News24 visited West End Primary School, in the Cape Flats suburb of Lentegeur, and found a hive of optimism, with staff putting finishing touches to their plans.
School principal Clive Arries explained their practical, “can-do” attitude: “This pandemic has been very, very tough on everybody. But this is the perfect opportunity for our school to live our values.”
Arries took News24 on a detailed tour of the entire campus, showing how learners’ movements would be carefully channelled, when they returned on Monday.
“Here we’ve got ‘social distancing lanes’, from the gate, where learners will enter from the gate. Learners will follow the lanes, in their own lanes, between the lines, and they will come and report to the school, where they will be screened,” Arries explained.
READ | Eastern Cape confirms schools without PPE will not reopen on Monday
They would then sanitise their hands, and enter.
Nearby was another waiting area, for parents, for when they collected their children.
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By the end of Friday, the school had hoped to have information back from parents, on how many Grade 7s would be returning.
“We’ve got four Grade 7 classrooms, of 40 learners each – and what we are going to do, on Monday, is have eight Grade 7 classes, and no class will have more than 20 learners.”
Classrooms had been re-arranged to accommodate the required distancing.
The teachers will be teaching as teams, with Grade 4, 5 and 6 teachers now joining their Grade 7 colleagues, to adapt to the new, evenly spread numbers.
In the school hall, teachers were wearing screens and sorting neat piles of work, which parents were arriving to pick up for their children, as homework.
READ | Here are the rules and dates for grades going back to school
Cleaning staff were deep-cleaning tirelessly, and Arries said: “Health and cleanliness are high on the agenda, for our learners and our teachers. In fact, our learners regard us as a ‘litter-free school’. And if you look around the school premises, you’ll see we are a graffiti-free school too.”
But while some Covid-19 safety interventions have taken laborious work, others have harnessed strokes of genius – like the staff parking area.
Teachers and support staff have happily relinquished their parking bays, beneath shaded awnings, to accommodate learners, now sheltered from the winter rains.
“If you look closely, we’ve painted red dots, which are 1.5 metres apart from each other, and under this enclosure we can easily accommodate about 200 learners, who we’re expecting on Monday,” Arries explained.
But 1 June will not be the first contact between learners and their school – as this school has retained vital contact with their school families, most in need, during the economic fallout from the lockdown.
“Among our values are ‘fairness’ and ‘helpfulness’ – and we’ve seen how the community and teachers have actually come out, through lockdown, and fed the learners – trying to assist the people in need. Those learners came to the school, every day, and we’ve fed 350 learners, every day, through our feeding scheme system,” Arries explained.
He stressed that West End Primary was a learning organisation, and his team would be adapting and improving on-the-run, from lessons learned, before more grades arrived.
In the WCED’s explanation of the steps to be taken by schools, provincial Minister of Education Debbie Schäfer listed preparation of school premises, learners and staff with comorbidities, screening of staff and learners for Covid-19 symptoms, physical distancing, and adjustments to the curriculum and transport as issues schools will have to grapple with.
The full list of values West End Primary lives by includes perseverance, fairness, respect, honesty, helpfulness, accountability, courage and tolerance – all of which appeared to be deeply ingrained in the school culture – and all staff interviewed radiated excitement at learners’ imminent return.
As Arries concluded the tour with News24, he boomed to staff hard at work: “Well done, everybody! You’re doing a great job!”
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