Pretoria - Learners usually cannot afford to buy masks after they have lost the ones provided by the Department of Basic Education.
Sympathetic to their plight, Tshwane MMC for Social Development Thabisile Vilakazi visited Winterveldt Secondary School to donate 1 000 masks to needy learners.
Vilakazi said her gesture would go a long way towards helping disadvantaged learners ward off the risks of contracting Covid-19.
“We are here because we have realised this pandemic is here to stay for some time. We know there are kids that come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Some of them don’t even have masks,” she said.
Some learners at times came to school without masks because they had lost them.
She said her department would like to distribute more masks to other schools in the municipality.
“We would like to donate masks to other schools as well, but this is the high school that has teenagers that interact with each other a lot and where the risk of contracting the virus exists,” Vilakazi said.
During her visit Vilakazi identified other social needs at the school which included learners being forced to go to bed on a hungry stomach and some without IDs.
“We are going to ask some social workers to come here and list those cases and see how we can come in as the Department of Social Development,” she said.
The masks were donated to the City by the South African Local Government Association and the UN Development Programme in a bid to curb the spread of Covid-19.
Vilakazi said there were another 3 000 masks planned for distribution to two other schools in Atteridgeville and Mamelodi.
Pretoria News