Management of Cornerstone Christian School said like many other schools, they too have been hit hard by Covid-19, more so as a private institution.
Mietsie Kruger, founder and principal of the school said with the year drawing to a close, valuable time is being lost, especially for the little ones in the Foundation Phase.
“What is worrying is that we still haven’t received permission to open our Early Childhood Development Centres. It will be a problem to simply graduate learners to next grades without thorough preparation from previous ones.”
It is important for the school to comply with the school-readiness assessments during which learners are assessed in the last term of Grade R to determine whether they are ready for school. The delay brought by Covid-19 is a major setback to the system,” she explained.
Other challenges they face are providing basic personal protective equipment (PPEs) in order for the school to function, and being able to carry the costs of supplying them to the entire school so that learners will have at least two masks each.
However, Mietsie said social distancing was not a problem, as they had all the necessary measures in place. “You will also see that in our hall the chairs are placed 1,5 metres apart, and we now have two groups for devotions,” she added.
Physical-contact extracurricular activities have been paused at the school. At the moment they function at 80 per cent capacity only, and following the Covid-19 scare, the school had to be closed to allow for the premises to be decontaminated.
She said although online lessons were introduced during lockdown, unfortunately not all the learners could benefit.
“We would send them exercises and teachers would mark them and send the results. Just like now in the classrooms, they do not touch the learners? books. We simply hand out sheets with their results,” Mietsie said.
Financially it is very difficult for the school as they still have to pay the staff. As some parents do not pay school fees, they had to settle for 25 per cent salary cuts in June.
“We do not discriminate, we send every learner of our school an exercise to complete. We hope that we will overcome the situation. As a Christian school we have faith that all this will be over soon,” Mietsie said.
