Social and Community Concerns

There is no lunch program here, which doesn’t pose a problem for the vast majority of students, as they simply walk home the few blocks to eat lunch with their families. In situations where the parents decided not to send them to the closest school but here instead, in hopes of a more quality education, not all of these students can make it all the way home for lunch – even more difficult for double utilization and double flux students who have a shorter lunch break. Other students forego lunch due to a situation of familial poverty, absentee parents, and various other socioeconomic difficulties, and too often come to school in the afternoon on an empty stomach.

“People prefer to help the rural areas,” Ndiaye explains, over the repetitive shouts of the Arabic class next door, “thinking that they face more problems than us in the urban centers. But they are wrong; we have problems, too.” Ndiaye has been working with the CODEC, the local pedagogical grouping, to set up a social commission, in order to first identify and then find ways to support children in difficult situations. He has already signaled, or learned from others, certain serious cases involving students that deserve attention, including a latchkey child with troublesome friends, a girl with mental issues who is not receiving the proper care, and the handful of students whose afternoon attention span and energy suffers from not having eaten lunch.

Being based in an urban center, Cheikh Mbaba Sow sees less cases of children without birth certificates, but it does have its fair share of parents who, with what they gain from their artisanal and commercial activities, cannot pay for the enrolment fees, or cannot purchase the necessary supplies for their children, from pens to books. Given that a part of the enrolment fees goes to cover the regular expenses of the school – water, electricity, a guard – late or non-existent fees put the school’s daily operations in danger. The school’s only recourse is to send the child home, as a “threat” to the parent to pay the fees, but such a measure is only temporary, rarely employed, and very rarely successful in obtaining the missing fees.

In addition, as a larger school with lots of traffic – not only from students, but from visitors on their way back from meetings at the Inspection next door – hygiene is a primary concern for the school. With the recent announcement of H1N1 arriving in Senegal, the director has requested more cleaning supplies. Without running water in the bathrooms, the school has a water basin they fill for washing hands. In addition, it is not easy to provide potable drinking water, uncontaminated by busy little hands, to the children. This means having drinking buckets, with bleach-treated water, and a cup in each classroom, although the unique cup is still shared throughout the group. So, recently, the staff has been encouraging parents even more to send their children to school with individual water thermoses.

Generally, challenges such as sensitizing parents, improving hygiene measures, collecting late fees, and exploring for additional funds to support the school would be taken up by the APE, the Association des Parent’s d’Elèves, similar to a Parent Teacher Association but with fiscal responsibilities and rights in the school. Regrettably, history has shown that the APE of Cheikh Mbaba Sow is too often focused on power struggles and political statements than it is on supporting the school. According to the director, the board members hold significant power in the community but do not want to act in favor of the school, leaving him searching for a strategy to work around them without displacing them. He’s still trying to narrow down the appropriate strategy, all the while lamenting the weak ties between his institution and the neighborhood surrounding it.