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{
    "id": 440571,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/440571/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 228,
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    "content": "that. However, I raised an issue with the parents and the teachers. There is an issue of initiative here. If that child was at home, he or she would have taken some uji . Therefore, if they can be fed at home, that means that they can be fed in school. I do not think it should take a school to organize parents to supply one pail of maize which can then be ground to become flour for the children to eat some breakfast. I remember Sen. Gwendo telling them not to always sit and wait for the Government to do things. She told them to be getting up to do things. Some of those things, she said, are not Government initiatives. The Government cannot go to organize people to those units. Parents should take responsibility. There was an attitude that I noticed. Once a child is taken to school, that child stops being the responsibility of the parents but that of the school. I think it is important for us to remember, as parents, that we are parents 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year. That is how much we are parents. Therefore, we cannot abandon and abdicate our responsibilities to teachers and say that schools will feed children. We urge the county governments to try and partner with parents so that they support the school feeding programmes. It is important for parents to contribute something towards that. As a result of that, we launched what we call the best classroom projects which are ongoing. I am happy to report to this House that in Kwale County, Members of the County Assembly (MCAs) are the first ones to carry out this initiative. They want to ensure that the best classroom in the school is the kindergarten. It should be built better and should look better than all the other classrooms because that is the first contact between the child and school. When children hate school, they do so because the first experience they had was very bad. When we visited Murang’a County and told them about this problem – Murang’a has been doing very badly until very lately – the County Executive responsible for education initiated a pilot project where they put old television sets in a couple of Early Childhood Development (ECD) Education classrooms. They would show children cartoons just like what children in Nairobi watch. The children were very excited that they wanted to go to school on Sunday. That is an investment that those people will never forget. It is very unlikely that a child who wants to go to school on Sunday will, at Standard 8, drop out of school, start smoking bang and become a criminal. We launched The Best Classroom Project and we are urging Senators, when oversighting the counties, to urge Governors to put money into ECD classrooms. Whereas we accept and we know that even primary school classrooms are not sufficiently done, the Fourth Schedule gives the county governments ECD as one of their responsibilities. Therefore, it makes no sense for me to say that we will build primary schools which are supposed to be financed by the national Government and we leave out the responsibility we have. Before you go clamoring for responsibility that is not yours, you should first finish what you have been given. We should walk around saying that we have built fantastic ECD classrooms all over the country and can, therefore, spare a bit of money to go to primary and secondary schools. That way, we will be building a foundation of people who want to be educated and not students who hate school. A combination of properly built infrastructure, feeding programmes in schools, entertainment for those children; television or whatever else that children in Nairobi get would make our children interested to attend school regularly with conviction. We are urging Governors, as they do their budgets, not to budget for primary schools before budgeting for ECDs. That is where their responsibility, first and foremost, lies."
}