Dr Böhmer Secondary School was established in 1977 and has been making it the school’s focal aim to provide a safe learning environment for mildly impaired learners or learners who have difficulty coping in mainstream schools.
The school focusses on equipping learners with afterschool basic skills that will enhance their chances of receiving jobs. The skills include basic early childhood development, mechanics, consumer studies, carpentry and agriculture.
“The school still provides the basic curriculum subjects such as Afrikaans, English and Physical and Social Development. Children are referred to school and fall under one, two, three or four,” said agriculture teacher, Walter Kotze.
Tennis and netball courts were the order of the day before agriculture as a subject was implemented at Dr Böhmer. The subject started five s ago and has gradually grown to being able to feed underprivileged learners from the school.
Developed into a small-scale farm, the school uses the agriculture subject to teach learners how to nurture and take care of chickens and what to do once eggs have been laid. The small-scale farming also consists of growing spinach, red onions, different strands of pumpkin, potatoes, cabbage and a few apricot trees.
“We teach the learners how to feed the chickens as well as to crop and harvest the fruits and vegetables. One of our students is quite eager to start his own business and sell fruit and veggies in Heidedal and that is what our aim with the garden is, to try and secure a brighter future for our learners,” said agriculture teacher Johan Nel.
Nel and Kotze gratefully mentioned that the garden would not have been possible without the assistance of Nutrifeeds and Pro-tek.
“Nutrifeeds sponsors our chicken feed which would’ve been completely out of our budget’s reach. The company also sponsored a trip to Nampo for the students. This trip taught them about farming. Some of them have never seen a tractor before, so this was a memorable experience,” said Nel.
Kotze further mentioned that the students’ hard work also pays off as they host markets and sell the fruits and veggies from the garden.
“We do not only equip our learners with hand skills but we also try to teach them the correct selling price, how to manage a business from this. Same with all the other subjects: In consumer studies, the learners are taught how to bake cakes and what to sell them for.
ECD enables the learners to paint building blocks supplied by our carpentry students that are also sold. Our welding students are currently busy making potjiekos stands as well as braai stands, we try our best to be self-sufficient. Our teachers are financially involved in making these students’ dreams come true because we want to equip our students to become skilled and independent thinkers,” concluded the agriculture teachers.
If you’d like to support the school, you can contact them on 051 522 6848. The school also advertises their products on their social media sites.
Watch the video below for a tour of Dr Bohmer Secondary school’s small scale garden:
Abigail Visagie
