Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Kenya students to get do-over in ’21
Keeping schools closed in pandemic may do more harm
NAIROBI, Kenya — For Esther Adhiambo, this year was supposed to be a year of endings and new beginnings. She was expecting to complete high school, enroll in a university and get a job to help her single mother, who runs a small tailoring business in Nairobi’s Mathare slum.
Instead, for Adhiambo and other Kenyan students, 2020 is turning out to be the year that disappeared. Education officials announced in July that they were canceling the academic year and making students repeat it. They are not expected to begin classes again until January, the usual start of Kenya’s school year.
Education experts believe Kenya is the only nation to declare the entire school year a total washout and order students to start over.
“It’s a sad and great loss,” said Adhiambo, 18, who wants to get a degree and a job in mass communications to help support her seven siblings. “This pandemic has destroyed everything.”
The decision to scrap the academic year, taken after monthslong debate, was made not just to protect teachers and students from the coronavirus but also to address glaring issues of inequality that arose when school was suspended in March, said education secretary George Magoha. After schools closed, some students had the technology to access remote learning, but others didn’t.
But while the goal of canceling the entire school year is to level the playing field, researchers said it might just widen these already-existing gaps. Once schools reopen, the two sets of students will not be on the same level or able to compete equally in national exams, Kenyan education experts said.
“It’s like day and night,” said Ken Ramani, an educational economist and communications director at The Technical University of Kenya, who has written widely about education in Kenya.
The decision to suspend the academic year affects more than 90,000 schools and over 18 million students in preprimary through high school, including 150,000 more in refugee camps, according to the education ministry. National exams usually taken by students in their last year of primary school and high school have also been postponed, and there will be no intake of new students in 2021.
Universities and colleges have also been closed for physical classes until January 2021 but can continue holding virtual instruction and graduations.
Kenya, like other countries, has been struggling with how to prevent the coronavirus from spreading while keeping schools and the economy humming. After strict restrictions kept the case count low, the country eased limitations on movement and has in the last month seen a sharp rise in cases. It has reported almost 26,000 infections and just over 400 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, but that may be a vast undercount because of lack of access to mass testing.
When the government shut down schools in March, it introduced remote lessons streamed over radio, television and videos posted on YouTube. However, for the vast majority of students, many in poor and rural households, remote learning was not an option. They didn’t have access to television, laptops, the internet or even the electricity to power these gadgets.
This was the reality facing Johnian Njue, 17, a 10thgrader who lives in Nairobi but attends a public boarding school in Kwale county in Kenya’s southeast. Raised by a single mother in the Mathare slum, Johnian had been attending the school on a rugby scholarship.
At home, with patchy electricity and no telephone, textbooks or internet, he said he has received little to no instruction from his teachers and has not been able to access the lineup of remote classes.
His experience bears little resemblance to that of 11year-old Verisiah Kambale.
Since March, Verisiah, a fifth-grader at the private
Makini School in Nairobi, has taken her classes, including mathematics, science and even physical education, through live video instruction. She interacts with her teachers and has also been able to talk with her classmates.
After school, she takes online classes in music theory and clarinet. She and her brother have the support of their parents, who are both working from home.
Even after the government canceled the rest of the school year, some private schools continued holding online classes and charging tuition. This has helped them to stay afloat and afford to pay rent and the salaries of tens of thousands of teachers, cooks, librarians and lab technicians, said Mutheu Kasanga, chair of the Kenya Private Schools Association.
At least 124 private schools are facing closure because of financial constraints brought over by the pandemic.
Kasanga said she was aware that the pandemic has exposed a “digital divide” that’s purely based on the socioeconomic status of parents. But instead of scrapping the school year — a move she described as “punishing the children” for the outbreak — she said education officials should have invested in practical solutions to keep children in school, like prioritizing internet connectivity to remote areas.
“As a country, we needed to rally around our poor people and ensure that every household is able to cater to the education of their children,” she said. By not doing that, she added, “we have failed as a country.”