Basic School

I was doing speech and hearing screenings at the Basic School all of last week and yesterday. The Basic School is where the children attend grades 1 through 9. Each grade has one class of around 30-45 children except for grades 8 and 9. Grade 8 has two classes and grade 9 has three. There is a large variance of ages in each grade; for example grade 8 has children ranging in age from 12 to 20 years old. The children wear blue uniforms to school, shorts for the boys and skirts or dresses for the girls. Many of the uniforms look old and dirty and many children come without shoes. The class rosters (called registers) are paper books that have old newspapers for covers.

Grades 8 and 9 attend school for a whole day. Grades 1 and 2 don't come in until 10 am, and the other grades leave a little after nooon. The school facility is made up of several buildings that house different classrooms. Many of the windows are broken, allowing lizards to sneak in and join the class. One day there was a cobra in the school office. The foundation for another building has been laid, but only has a few layers of bricks that the students use to sit on while they talk to one another during breaks. The bathrooms are "squatty potties" in outhouses (yuck)!

We do our screenings in the library, which is a tiny building with one main room, as well as a bathroom and storage closet which are both blocked off by stacks of wood. There are old, dusty books scattered around the room. Occasionally a student or teacher will wander in and scavenge for a book. There is one main desk in the room and two tables. We did sign in and speech screenings at the desk, two hearing screenings at a time at one table, and Brittany's testing (or more speech screenings when those were finished) at the other table. The children are not tested for English proficiency until grade 2, so for the younger children (and some of the older ones) we had a translator help explain the directions to the children in Tonga.


Ashley Dowler