Madibeng Primary School in Ikageng will be flying the Potchefstroom and North West flags high after qualifying for the national finals of the Youth Citizens Action Programme (YCAP).
The strong-minded and community-driven learners managed to come out tops in the province with their YCAP project theme of reading.
YCAP is a Department of Education programme which entails learners from primary and high school in the land identifying a problem in the school or community and finding a solution to the problem. In this competition, teachers are there to offer advice and the learners are the ones who must solve the problem. Some of the problems include bullying, late-coming, vandalism, the shortage of textbooks and the high fai-lure rate.
According to Mr Makanaki Mmolai, Madibeng Primary School educator, their school identified reading as a major issue in the broader Tlokwe community. He says people are generally too lazy to read and that should change. In their drive to instil a culture of reading at the school, the educators adjusted their school’s timetable and included the period “stop and read”. Every Monday and Wednesday, the school stops at 13:40 and learners are free to take out community newspapers or short story books and read until 14:10.
“The school went out to the community in a bid to tackle the problem of reading and to encourage the whole community to read. They asked the Potchefstroom Herald if they could distribute the weekly Midweek newspapers to all the schools in Ikageng. The learners were taken to the nearby community library to apply for the library cards,” he said.
Makanaki delightfully describes how the school went to taxi ranks, hawkers, businesses, other schools, the unemployed in the streets, communities and handed out Midweek newspapers to encourage the community to read.
“We approached companies in Potchefstroom and asked them to put magazines, newspapers, and books at their receptions to encourage reading. The school also advised the parents to stop spoiling the learners with cell phones and rather buy novels from nearby bookstores. They appealed to parents to start reading, thereby setting an exam-ple to their children. Makanaki says the reading problem is widespread and can even be found at institutions of higher learning. “In universities, there is a high rate of dropouts ever year and this is the result of students who do not want to read. This has nothing to do with their intelligence because they passed Gr. 12 and were accepted into tertiary institutions,” he said.
Makanaki says the learners are excited to be part of this competition again. “This is not the first time that our dedicated learners have taken part in the YCAP competition. Last year, they at-tained the second position in the national finals by choosing the shortage of school textbooks in schools as their topic. The NW Department of Education commended the school for managing to collect about 3 000 textbooks from homes. We saved the Department of Education a lot of money and that is impressive,”he said.
The school is hoping to win the finals in Pretoria between 22 and 24 July.