After a prolonged spell at home due to the COVID-19 lockdown, learners who got back to classes encounter difficulty in making up for the lost time. They hardly memorise items they were taught, the City Review can now reveal.

Schools were reopened in May 2021 enabling children to return to their respective schools. Those who started the new academic journey included the teenage mothers who were admitted to enrol at different schools.

But in most schools, the journey has not been easy nearly two months since schools’ reopened.

Mary Mun, a headteacher of Juba Senior Secondary School, said the management is going slow on learners with acknowledgement of the psychological impacts they suffered as a result of a lengthy homestay.

“It was a long time but to be honest at least by now a bright student must have learnt and is at the peak of what we are teaching,” she said.

‘Yet to catch the rhythm’

The head master of Juba Day Senior Secondary School, George Kenyi, said some of the students are still behind while others have picked up ahead of the learning curve.

 “Those who already reported to school are coping up because we [are] giving them exercise according to what we have taught on that day,” the head of administration said.

“We are practicing accelerated learning, where slow learners are left behind so for us to make sure all of them catch up-we give them extra lessons,” he said.

He said they are trying to help slow learners to catch up with the rest of the students.

At Nile Model Secondary School, the learning ability of kids has sharply dropped. Levi Jimbo Lausu, a teacher said that the children are too slow.

“Children have stayed home for long and they have been engaged in other activities, it has made it hard for them to cope up with studies,” he said.

A student from Juba Diocesan Model Secondary School Peace, Keji Manasi, in Senior 4, said she was happy to get back to school after a while despite the challenges she faced.

“We have forgotten a lot of things, most of the things to do with schools. Generally, school work, the lessons we learnt a year ago are all gone,” Keji said.

“And there was too much work as well at home, we didn’t get time to read some of the materials we had,” she added.

Patrick Avellino Lototo from the same school said school reopening had rejuvenated his psychology as he was now picking up with learning. But it was hard on the first days.

“The lockdown really impacted us very negatively. We were not able to consult a teacher, it was very difficult for us to remember things,” he narrated.

He added that although they were given handouts, studying without the support of a teacher around made little to no sense because no one could even explain to him.

The coronavirus was declared a pandemic in South Sudan in April 2020. In the same month, the government announced a partial lockdown which saw all public places, including schools, closed. The lockdown kept at least 2 million children out of school for one year according to data from the United Nations international Childers’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF).