Every year educares lose teachers over the December-January period.
The reason? No money to pay salaries because parents don’t pay fees when they take their children out of school for the holidays.
We are working to change that as part of our Professional Development programme for principals and senior teachers, by focusing on parent engagement.
For most of us who are parents, fundraising by the parent body to support more affluent schools is a regular annual event. In our experience parental involvement of this kind is very rare in poor communities – especially at a pre-school level. Consequently, few principals and their teams have ever experienced active participation in running a fundraising event.
For Ali Corbett, it looked like an ideal Professional Development opportunity for experiential learning that would deliver immediate benefit if the principals and their teams at the 9 centres were up for the challenge with Starting Chance. They were!
Each educare principal nominated their team’s target for selling coupons ahead of the event, and everyone met their target to collectively raise more than R60 000. But the real highlight was the overwhelmingly positive response of parents!
After a frenetic few days leading in to the day, more than 2000 parents and children came to the Fair Play Fun Day. Thanks to 40 plus volunteers and the educare teams, and fabulous support from companies sponsoring catering on the day, the fair was a huge success.
At yesterdays after action review with the principals, the steep learning curve was evident to everyone involved. One of the great successes of the day was the participation of special needs children and their parents. Working through the challenges we experienced as a team led to some great ideas for improvements next time. The main question on everyone’s mind was “When can we do this again?”
Help us to support our teachers and give them a salary in December. Please use this link to donate to Starting Chance:
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