By REBECCA MUSHOTA –
LUPIYA School in Chief Chiwala’s area in Masaiti District is seeking funds for roofing sheets on eight classrooms that have been built by the community.
The school headteacher Obed Silavwe said in an interview that the school needed about K60,000 to place roofing sheets on the eight classrooms that the community built to add to the existing five classrooms.
“The school was built in 1940 and since then, it only has five classrooms and six teachers’ houses. The infrastructure is not sufficient to cater for the high number of pupils and so we decided to build more classrooms,” Mr Silavwe said.
He said the 18 villages that send their children to the school agreed to mould bricks and pay local bricklayers to build the eight classrooms last May.
Mr Silavwe said he was also grateful to Lafarge Cement who contributed 200 bags of cement and Ndola Lime who contributed stones towards the project.
The walls for the eight classrooms were done and that what was required now were roofing sheets and the rooms would be ready for learning.
Mr Silavwe said the existing five classrooms were not able to accommodate the 650 pupils at the school which runs from pre-school to Grade 10.
The number of hours for learning has been reduced and the classes in some instances have been combined to create time and space for all pupils to learn.
Mr Silavwe said he was impressed that the community had built the eight classrooms for themselves without any kind of funding and appealed to well-wishers to come on board and help the pupils learn in a better environment.
He said he was hopeful that the school would have 55 classrooms by the end of next year then embark on taking running water and electricity to Lupiya School.
The school now has 20 teachers.