Build School Library & Storeroom for 650 Students

After a two year time period of no in-person schooling for many students, we're happy to report that the school year began this past Monday for all students from Nursery through university!  This means the Agwata school and its library are very busy!  This photo shows Lucy, the school librarian along with the Head Teacher, checking in pupils at the library.

This year's 5th and 6th grade classes are both very large classes with over 60 students in each.  This means that besides textbooks for the younger students, the library needs additional copies of textbooks for 5th and 6th graders. 

We hope that the remaining funds for this library project can be raised this year so we can buy the remaining needed textbooks as quickly as possible.  The need is great because the lockdowns and restrictions in Uganda during Covid caused most parents'/guardians' incomes to decrease drastically. 

Parents and students alike are relying more heavily on the school to provide the necessary textbooks and scholastic materials while the parents concentrate on providing food for their families.  Parents are struggling to recover their livelihoods in a very poor country which was unable to provide any help to its citizens or their businesses during the pandemic.

We hope our library can be a source of stability and a beacon of hope to students, parents and the community. Outreach Uganda staff and teachers alike are doing everything possible to encourage all students to return to school.  The library is a very critical piece of this effort.

We thank you for your past support of the library and encourage you to share this progress report with friends, family and friends who share a love of books, school and belief in the incredible importance of education in children's lives, or who might have faced and overcome hardships of their own.

Links:

• Our web site.
• See our work in photos.

We shared with you last time in June that our 6th grade students had done well on their "mock" national exams that they had taken earlier in the year, and that they were awaiting the results of their real exams. Teachers, students and our staff were all excited about the students' performance this past year, They could see a direct connection between the availability of the library and its access to both textbooks and other books, and the students' improved learning and test performance. 

Well, we are very excited to share with you now that the results came out in July and our 6th graders achieved second place overall in the district out of 74 primary schools that took the 6th grade exams. It's a tremendous accomplishment. Five of our students (3 were girls) were the top 5 performing students in our sub-county. 

So, we thank everyone who has supported this project for contributing to this success story. It means that many of our students will be able to continue on to secondary school and that the top students will have choices of very good schools to attend for 7th to 12th grade. We have included photos of two of our 5  top students who received awards from the sub-county this past Monday to celebrate their exam achievement.  The 5 were quite excited about the mattresses they received since these are a required item for when they board at school in 7th grade.

With school scheduled to be back in session at the beginning of January, we would very much like to raise the remaining needed funds for this library project. As mentioned in earlier reports, they are mainly needed to purchase additional class textbooks for younger classes which often only have a small amount of textbooks that must be shared among many students. 

We do see there is a very direct link between each student having ready access to textbooks in the library and in class, and to their improved performance in school as well as their increased enthusiasm about school.

Please share this project report with teachers, librarians, friends, family and others you may know who are passionate about education for all!

Again, thank you so much for your support of this project!

Links:

• Our web site
• See our work through photos