Maame Krobo Community Day School cries for attention

The MaameKrobo Community Day School, which is strategically sited few kilometres from the Maame Krobo Township, is appealing for a school bus and a headmaster’s vehicle.

This is to facilitate the movement of the headmaster for official assignments and also help convey the students from the school to the town where almost all the students stay.

Ease movements

“Currently, the headmaster relies on the few commercial vehicles in town for any official duty he has to carry out outside the school,” the Acting Headmaster of the school, Mr Moses Anner Teye, told the Daily Graphic in an interview.

Mr Teye, who is also the Afram Plains South District Director of Education, said he believed that a bus for the school would not only create the needed environment for teaching and learning, but would also trigger a surge in enrolment, adding that the school had enough classrooms to handle any number of students placed there.

He, therefore, appealed to the GES management to treat as urgent the need to get the school a bus that would help convey the students and their teachers from the school to the other end of the town where most of the students trek every day to school and back.

Hostel facility

He said the distance from the town to the school was such that by the time the students got to school in the morning, they were either late or too tired to begin the day, describing the situation as not good enough condition for effective teaching and learning environment.

Mr Teye also suggested the possibility of adding a hostel facility to the school to attract more students, explaining that most of the students were from the surrounding communities and, therefore, had to hire rooms in town to stay while attending the school and said it was not the best condition for young people of the age of the students.

Lack of teachers

Speaking on the lack of teachers, Mr Teye stated that it was unfortunate that the school had to continuously rely on national service persons to handle the subjects because it did not have permanent teachers.

He said he had been hopeful that the school was going to benefit from the recent recruitment of new teachers by the GES, but only one teacher was posted to the school.

Mr Teye said he was worried that the current SHS Three students who were offering science were put in a tight corner because apart from the lack of permanent teachers, the school science laboratories were poorly equipped.

He said since he took over the acting position, the students had been asking him how they were going to write the various science practical exams, since they did not have the full complement of the equipment and teachers.

Mr Teye hinted that he was going to pursue the contractors who put up the school to return to furnish the laboratories since the furnishing was part of the cost of the building of the school.

CSSPS

Briefing the Daily Graphic on the state of the school, Mr Teye explained that since the school began operating, the district had drawn the attention of the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) secretariat to the fact that it was not placing candidates in the school and was hopeful that it would be corrected.

He expressed the belief that if the school was placed under the CSSPS, many more students would select the school, especially those within the catchment areas.

Abnormalities

Reacting to the plight of the school, the Director-General of the GES, Prof.Kwasi Opoku Amankwa, said the GES headquarters had noticed the abnormalities and that he and his deputies would take up the issues confronting the school and “make them part of our priorities.”

“Especially, because it is a community school, we will want to encourage children in such communities to go to school,” he said, adding that the GES was dispatching a team to the Eastern Region to work with the regional education directorate to ensure that those abnormalities were rectified.

School now on CSSPS

Throwing more light on the issue of the CSSPS, the Deputy Director-General of the GES, Dr K.B. Tandoh, explained that information from the CSSPS secretariat had confirmed that from this year, students to the school would be placed under the CSSPS.

“I am adequately informed by the CSSPS that that problem had been fully resolved,” Dr Tandoh explained to the Daily Graphic.