Alot has happened since Friday...as a matter of fact we have been going non stop since we arrived and so I am going to do a few short posts to get caught up.
Friday turned out to be a great day visiting 2 distinctly different schools: Msalato Secondary School and Martin Luther School.
Msalato was a public girls residential school for Form 1 - 6. The UDOM MIS/SME Team met with the headmistress Ms. Anisia Nenze and spent about 1.5hours chatting about the admissions/registration & tracking systems used at the school....in a nutshell everything is done completely manually - starting with taking a ruler and drawing columns in a note book with handwritten titles and writing in the student details line by line....the book was dated back to the 1970s tracking students in no particular order right up until 2008 admissions...computers (about 3) only appear to be used by the admin staff and only use word processing (the computer lab had only 4 working machines and several that were unusable). Anisia was a lovely, calm natured woman who at first seemed reluctant to share info with us. However, Beth did a great job of asking clear questions and pulling the information we needed (I take copius notes)...all said, we gained great perspective on the challenges faced by the school: 700 residential students, 45 teachers (25 who live on site), usually 50-55 students per class, very tight in the dorms....70 Tanzania shillings per year to attend (alot of money for the daughters of peasants)
Conversely, Martin Luther school (a private primary school) was at the opposite end of the spectrum. Firstly, the building was 3 stories high and spread over a fairly large well landscpaded campus. 950 students, 550 who are residential and the remaining are day students. 550,000 Tshs per term (3) or for day students about 900,000 Tshs per year (still alot of money for the parents of these kids - mainly diplomats, doctors, university profs etc). The headmaster ( Emmanuel ) was very young and very progressive in his approach and thinking. When Dr Mvuma commented and referred to Emmanuel as a "young guy" he immediately retorted back that he was not a guy! We were all a little taken aback not knowing what the issue was but figured out later that Emmanuel was only 26 yrs old and was already the headmaster of the school! He was very interesting in that he was from a Masai tribe near Arusha yet was dressed in very trendy clothes. Although he said he dresses in traditional Masai tribal clothes when he is home visiting his parents. Computer use was by all of the admin staff however teachers were not tracking grades or attendance through any programs yet. Mainly 2 spreadsheets were used for tracking: admissions of students providing registration numbers & fee payment...but the twoo were not linked into a central database yet. The computer lab had 45 working computers and were used mainly to teach the children how to use word and play games!
hopefully we'll be able to visit at least 2 more schools next week.
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