Starting Shot
Finally, St. Francis and Clare is filled with excited students! The first weeks after opening the Secondary School have passed. Everyday the school is working hard to settle as fast as possible to run high quality education.
On January 14th everything was well prepared and ready to welcome the new pupils and teachers.Due to the matters of a certain mentality when it comes to the educational system of Zambia, not every child and teacher had appeared at the opening time.Opening a new school is a process and some steps must be followed. Therefore, the first week of the school year in Zambia is a week of orientation. It is a week that is used for administrative, orientational and preparing issues.
While facing the next term and year, we are looking forward to introducing a different mindset to our new members in terms of learning and reliability. For us, it is very important to understand the situation of our people; clarifying and analyzing the problems that delays teachers and students has our full attention. At the same time, we are trying to create discipline and consciousness about punctuality.
Most of our teachers got transferred from other schools to support us at St. Francis and Clare from now on. Before they are free to get transferred, they must clear their files at their old school and take over their responsibilities, which can take some time. Moreover, challenges like finding new accommodation near the new school and moving to the new place are coming up, which can delay the teachers to report in time.
There are also several issues coming up to delay the students to attend to class from day one on. St. Francis and Clare Secondary School is based in a highly populated area, in which a lot of
families struggle to come up with the money for school fees and uniform. Smaller issues like going to a doctor for a medical check or doing passport picture scan become a challenge. Both are
needed to register, but due to few resources of money for transport or less time from the parents to escort their children, it becomes a difficulty for some families to fulfill these apparently
requirements.
The first months of the year can be very hard for families, especially if they have more than one child in school. Very often the children must help working at home or selling things to get
money, meanwhile they are not allowed to attend school.
Especially by knowing the challenges of our students and teachers, we are proud to run four out of six classes, filled with motivated and joyful students,so far. Every day the school is growing. New teachers report, new students register and collect their school uniform, to enter class as fast as possible. Soon we will have six classes (three Grade 8, three Grade 10) with a total number of 270 students and 15 teachers at our school.
The atmosphere at the school is amazing. Doesn’t matter where you are going, if you meet teachers, managers, students or workers, you can find positives vibes and a hard-working mentality everywhere.We are very proud of our people which are working hard to form this school every day to something very special. We are looking forward to powerful learning and studying at St. Francis and Clare Secondary School.After all, we are very happy to finally see students learning in our classrooms.
