St Johns School in Harare is charging students up to $99,000 per term for online lessons during the lockdown currently happening in Zimbabwe. St Johns school has has directed parents to deposit the money so as to facilitate the on going efforts to improve online learning.
The move is has sparked a debate about education inequality as students from rural areas and other less privileged communities will not be able to learn.
Part of the letter by St Johns School read:
As you will be well aware, we have for some time been operating in increasingly difficult circumstances in Zimbabwe. The latest unwelcome challenge we face is the onset of the Covid19 pandemic which has only served to complicate things further. At this point in time, we have had no communication from Ministry of Education, and therefore we do not know whether schools will re-open on Tuesday 5 May. We have, to a certain extent, been fortunate that the lockdown has, up to now, coincided with the school holidays. However, as you will be aware, St John’s had already started online and remote schooling at the end of the first term which was truncated by the lockdown. Since then, the schools’ management and staff have been hard at work, both continuing with the provision of online learning, and proactively preparing and improving systems for online and remote teaching in the event that the lockdown extends beyond the start of the Trinity term. Our sincere appreciation goes to our management and staff for all their hard work on preparations for the upcoming term during the lockdown. From a financial perspective our schools continue to incur fixed costs, whether the schools are fully open with students attending school, or in providing online and remote teaching. For this reason, your Board has decided at this stage to raise an interim deposit to meet these fixed costs for the Trinity Term. This deposit covers the cost of ensuring that academic online and remote teaching operation will be in place for the full term. Once we have been informed by Ministry of Education of the official date for the re-opening of the schools, the Board’s Finance Committee will reconvene to determine the level of incremental costs there will be, and any resulting further fee requirement to open the schools in line with Ministry dates and guidelines.
