How Sweets & Biscuits Served as Our Post Covid19 School Recovery Plan.

The immediate years (2021-2022) after the Covid19 pandemic were very devastating to every school in the country.

All our neighbouring private schools that had not lasted 5 years collapsed except for one other school owned by a reknown business man.

Our school drop out rate had exponentially skyrocketed to near collapse.

We realized, if we had to send pupils home for fees; we had to close the school.

Even then, we still lost a class. Every parent bargained with the school to wait for the beans harvest season.

When we finally got to the beans harvest season, food security in their families were their priority and education a luxury.

We nearly collapsed in 2021. While parents had failed to pay, teachers were demanding payment.

Amidst this challenge, half of my staff left despite my highly spirited motivational speeches on resilience.

First, I placed pupils from two classes in one and they shared a teacher. Even then, our teacher student ration remained an average of 1:10.

The only teachers who remained were born again christians. This in my mind was divine intervention. God definitely heard our prayers.

In 2022, the school had to improvise a Covid19 recovery plan or else prepare to close.

I had started imagining what I would do with the structures but non of the ideas settled with my head and heart.

As I contemplated, an idea crossed my mind. My childhood greatest experiences in primary school were the days Fr. John Scalabrini visited my school,  Bishop Angelo Negri Primary School.

On such days, the school offered tinned beef, or tinned mackarel fish.

Mackerel is a common name applied to a number of different species of pelagic fish, mostly from the family Scombridae.

We also regularly received gummy candies or jelly sweets.

It was clear, our target was to get the pupils back to school and keep them in school if we are to avoid closure.

In our Covid19 school recovery plan, I improvised and bought chewing gum sweets with tatoos and Britania milk and glucose biscuits.

On ocassions, I carried a big baked cake with pictures of children on them.

These sweets and biscuits worked miracles. While our idea was to show parents we cared more about the children’s welfare; the pupils placed the tattoes on their bodies and ran home to show their friends who dropped out.

Also, this became the only way parents knew I visited the school. This gave parents confidence that the school was not about to close instead I was getting more involved in the day to day running of the school.

As a result, we noticed more students returning to school by the number of pupils with no uniforms and bare footed.

We also ensured we had enough sugar for porridge as this was a unique attraction for pupils who lacked sugar in their porridge at home.

We suspended the school uniform rule to keep pupils who were sneaking from home in school.

And then, I declared my routine school visit days of the week and ask teachers to write notes to parents asking for fees.

The kids would bother their parents for fees because Friday is the day the Director(myself) would return with sweets and biscuits.

It’s also on that day that I experienced more parents visiting the school to ask for more time to pay or pay minimal instalments.

By 2023, the school had started recovering its teacher to pupil ratio average of 1:20 per class.

Our back to school, stay in school Covid19 recovery plan campaign had worked miracles.

In 2024, our focus was building confidence in the parents by recruiting more teachers to the school.

Now that I was gainflly employed, I picked a loan and built two classroom blocks to signal progress and soon saw all my pupil deserters back to Sylvester Nursery & Primary School.

Many of whom had joined other distant schools. Parents saw no reason to make their children walk miles to school yet we were getting better by the day.

Recently, I overheard them poke a parent who had held one of his sons in primary four where he was a lone pupil in his class at the known businessman’s school.

At the beginning of the year, I printed coloured pictorial calenders and distributed it to parents with their pictures on it to identify them with the school.

Every shop at the trading center and sub county office received our calenders. Many of which were taken to their homes to decorate their houses and not the shops and sub county offices.

We are highly expectant that as we celebrate our 10 years of existence in 2025; our teacher student ratio will go back to the days before Covid19. Our teacher student ratio then was 1:50 per class.

This recovery also came with new insights.Our post Covid19 parents are much younger with basic education hence more passionate about their children’s education.

Their return was motivated by a cleasure school leadership with a focus and vision.

Since the Covid19 pandemic,I have never increased their school fees cost. I also focused all school earnings to paying teachers wages in time.

Most profit focused schools increased fees to meet their post Covid19 school development plans while others had running loans.

The continous increasing loan interest rate influenced their schools financial plan and their schools collapsed.

In one incident, a story is told of a School Director following up parents at drinking joints and funerals asking for his school fees balance.

At this rate, his school could not survive. It collapsed and we absorbed their pupils in our school.

This is how this year, we graduated 18 pupils in grade 3 nursery school to primary from 4 pupils that graduated last year,2023.

Like ladies like to say: It’s the small things that matter. Yes, the sweets and biscuits were our post Covid19 economic recovery plan for our school. And it mattered.

If we had relied on the much spoken about government economic recovery plan to buy sweets and biscuits, we would have closed like many schools in the country.

Picture Caption: These Ice Creams were prepared & packed and supplied by Las Cafe, in Gulu City