Friday, October 1, 2010

KOBILMAGU ISLAMIC SCHOOL IN DEEP CRISIS



A visit by savannahnews to the Kobilmagu Sobriya Islamic School, one of the government schools in the Tamale Metropolis has revealed the level of deprivation and the poor condition under which the school operates.

Actually, the revelations at the school do not conform to Ghana’s policy of promoting quality basic education. The Kobilmagu Sobriya Islamic School was established in 1988 by one Alhaji Alhassan Sulemana with 87 children but it was absorbed by government in 1992 and now has a student population of over 800.

It also has 35 teaching staff from the Kindergarten to Junior High School. Unfortunately however the School lacks the necessary infrastructures especially at the lower primary.
This is because Government, the Ghana Education Service and for that matter the Tamale Metropolitan Assembly have since 1992 failed to provide even a single structure at the school.
All the facilities in the school according to our information were provided by the Kobilmagu Community and other NGOs but they are awfully inadequate.

At the moment over 183 children at the Kindergarten are crowded in one room with only one female teacher. What seems to have compounded the plight of the innocent children is the fact that they sit on their eating bowls to study each day and use the same bowls for their School Feeding meals.

Some of the children sometimes urinate in their bowls when classes are in session and most of them use the bowls unwashed.

The Head Teacher of the Kobilmagu Sobriya Islamic KG, Madam Baba Fati told the blogger that most of the children in the school are indeed interested in accessing quality education but most of them are turned away because of lack of classroom accommodation.

According to her, the children who were now starting education and were supposed to receive the best of treatment and the necessary learning materials were rather faced with a lot of challenges.

Madam Fati therefore called on government to provide the requisite support to the school in order to change the poor conditions of the pupils.

The Headmistress of the School, Hajia Salamatu Mahama also complained about the general conditions at the school which she said were making teaching and learning very difficult.

According to her, even though the School was one of the best performing schools in the Tamale Metropolis it lacked so many facilities including classrooms, furniture, library and computers.

The Headmistress therefore called on the MP for the area, Haruna Iddrisu who is also the Communications Minister to assist the School with computers since the only two computers purchased from the Capitation Grant are awfully insufficient for the over 800 pupils.

However the paper gathered that over 400 children of school going ages have applied for admission into the School this year but the School does not have the capacity to even admit one of them. The founder of the School, Alhaji Alhassan Sulemana in an interview confirmed that the School could not admit fresh pupils until some additional infrastructures are put in place.


Credit: Edmond Gyebi

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