The teachers’ January money diet
Athough all the centres are open again, they are still quite empty. The parents are all feeling the pinch of Christmas spending, school uniforms, fees and stationary for their children, so the pre-schoolers have to wait until February, or even later, to go to school.
The ECD practitioners are rather anxious, as January is always a lean month (or at least a lot leaner than the other rather lean months of the year!). Also, some were paid no fees for December. We had a long talk about this at our first training session for the year. We hope to make next year work a little better in this respect. To do this we will be trying to get registration for 2013 sorted out by September/October this year (with an offer to parents to pay their registration and January school fees then – the bait being that they pay a little less).
The fees are very low. The most asked is R200 a month for full day care with breakfast, lunch and a snack included (mostly provided by Africa Food for Thought). The teachers will ask for about R50 extra each month this year to cover outings, December fees and a graduation at the end of the year. This means that parents are paying R10 a day for their what we hope are their most precious priority – their children! And at two women to about 25-30 children that is not more than R3000 to pay for wages, cleaning materials, some food and maintenance...
But, unfortunately, some parents are managing on just the child-care grant that only just covers the fees, or some on nothing at all if they can’t access the grant – especially if they are foreigners. So one of our next tasks is to find some “bursaries” for the children of parents who are struggling.