Please help us, Mr President!
This is the desperate plea of pupils at a badly dilapidated high school in the small Eastern Cape town of Stutterheim.
For years now, children at Siyakhula Public School have been studying in crumbling, broken classrooms, while contending with a glaring shortage of learning materials, including textbooks.
Despite the dire conditions, the matric class of 2025 returned a pass rate of more than 85% last year.
But the worried youngsters say the school's infrastructure challenges are worsening, and they are now pinning their hopes on President Cyril Rampahosa, who is set to visit the town on Thursday.
The pupils claim that their many pleas to Eastern Cape education authorities over the past few years have fallen on deaf ears, with officials repeatedly breaking promises to fix the school.
The Dispatch visited Siyakhula on Wednesday and witnessed firsthand its pressing infrastructure challenges, which were evident as the team entered the rundown classrooms.
Pupils described the conditions as "a disaster waiting to happen", pointing to number of classrooms blighted by broken ceilings and chalkboards, which are reportedly extremely cold in winter.
During the rainy season, they must contend with leaking roofs.
And what passes for a science laboratory is a shell of its former self.
“We don’t feel safe, we are scared for our lives,” a grade 10 pupil said while showing the Dispatch team a hole in a roof.
Most doors don’t have handles, while parts of the wooden floors are patched with metal sheets to cover gaping holes.
Exposed electrical cables add to the many dangers pupils face.
The youngsters told the Dispatch that a pupil was injured last year after falling into one of the holes.
They said Ramaphosa was now their only hope in getting their school infrastructure challenges addressed.
The president will be in town to visit a Land Bank-supported Redland Dairy Farm project.
He is also expected to address community members at the Mzwandile Fanti hall later on Thursday.
This is where the Siyakhula pupils are hoping to get an opportunity to be heard.
They plan to hand Ramaphosa a memorandum of their grievances, "to bring to his attention the ongoing infrastructure and resource crisis at our school".
The school, situated in town and catering for pupils from poor families, has little less than 300 pupils.
In a letter to the Dispatch, one of the pupils, Liviwe Kiva, said it serves a low-income community and suffers from chronic structural and educational resource limitations.
"Despite these severe constraints, our educators and learners achieved an outstanding 85.7% matric pass rate last year.
"However, our daily learning environment is severely compromised, with structural degradation, including broken doors, shattered windows, unsafe wooden flooring with holes, damaged ceilings and classrooms lacking basic electrical lighting."
He said over the years, the Eastern Cape department of education had repeatedly dispatched inspectors to photograph the damage, yet no physical repairs, maintenance, or lab equipment had ever been provided.
The deputy president of the school's representative council of learners, Mihle Silere, highlighted some of the critical challenges faced by pupils.
"We do not have textbooks. We do not have computers, and we only have one projector.
"Everyone, from grade 8 to grade 12, uses that same projector; the grade 12s being prioritised the most," she said.
"Our hall is small; it cannot accommodate every learner, so when it's raining, we do not have an assembly because we do not have enough space in the hall.
"Also, our nutrition is not enough.
"Food sometimes runs out while we are still waiting to dish up, and if we want everyone to eat, we have to dish up smaller portions."
Another issue is hygiene.
Silere said of the four girls' toilets at the school, only two were functioning.
"In the boys' toilets there aren't any doors. Some of us don't even go to the toilets because we know they are unhygienic."
Asked what she would say to Ramaphosa, if given the chance, she said: "I would tell the president that we also need a lab because sometimes we do investigations, and they ask us to bring our phones so we can search for the videos on YouTube to see how the investigation was done.
"We want to get a chance to see the practical side of physics. We want to be able to go to the lab and do the experiments."
School governing body member Vuyokazi Kiva echoed the pupils' concerns, saying they had been given the runaround by education authorities when they visited their offices to raise concern about the dire conditions.
Kiva said the teachers were doing their best to ensure the pupils achieved good results but were being hampered by the poor physical conditions and lacked critical resources.
Vuyisile Thulelo, who has a child in grade 10 at the school, said the parents' only wish was for Siyakhula "to improve to better conditions".
"This is an old school, and it was used during the apartheid era.
"Most things are not in good condition, so help is really needed so that our kids can get a good education."
When asked to comment, Eastern Cape education department spokesperson Malibongwe Mtima said: "A team of professionals [has] been instructed to undertake a proper conditional assessment to determine the extent of damage at the school and make recommendations [in respect] thereof."
Ramaphosa's spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, said he could not comment on the challenges facing the school as it was not on the radar of the president's planned visit to Stutterheim.