BECE candidates use church auditorium as classroom

A basic school in the Bawku West District of the Upper East region, Boya-Kpalsako Junior High School, is probably where the quickest intervention available is wanted in Ghana today because of the risks of the deprivation there.

Final-year students of the school, who are expected to take part in the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) coming up next week, have, for the lack of a classroom block, endured a whole year being taught inside an unlikely structure: a church auditorium.

They graduated from a boiling, congested room that is supposed to be the school’s library, currently occupied by those in their second year. The first-year students are receiving lessons inside a poorly ventilated, fractured structure built with mud and not only liable to a sudden collapse but is also evidently in the ‘wrath book’ of rainstorm as the region enters the threshold of torrential rains.

The school is in an extremely dry community, Boya-Kpalsako, where many children have not seen their own district capital before even in books let alone face to face. Any opportunity for such children to see the district capital, which in itself is thoroughly rural and deprived, is like putting a child in Accra, the national capital, on a flight to see London or to interact with New York for the first time.

On the school’s compound is a roofless structure standing in ruins and, with fatigued old walls scarred by cracks and bleached looks, screaming for repair. Authorities of the school say they have a dream to demolish that structure and put up a new one on the same spot so the endangered students can be there, but “proposals are not attracting funds”.

“Most often, when the church people have their activities that coincide with lessons, we have to suspend classes and allow them to use their church because the church belongs to them,” the headmaster of the school, Simon Atewini Amidini, told Starr News.

He added: “This is the first time we are going to write the BECE. They are not well taught like their colleagues in other places because most instructional time is being lost (to church activities). What the teachers are supposed to cover, they are not able to cover because time, instructional time, is lost.”

Pains of the church-class environment

The church building, said to be the property of the Lighthouse Chapel International, is roofed but still under construction whilst being used for worship. There are no windows yet and there are no doors.

The startling spectacle of a school rather at the mercy of a church, in a region so a prolific breeder of individual young churches looking to the schools for space that as many as four different denominations could share one classroom block for services happening at the same time amid interfering noises in the building, perhaps holds more pains than gains for the rural students.

As of the time Starr News visited the school Monday, the students were waiting quietly for the next lesson. There was no chalkboard in front, except a banner bearing the church’s name: Lighthouse Chapel International. The banner was nailed to the yet-to-be-plastered walls of the building with a pair of drums standing by.

“Due to lack of classrooms, our academic performance goes down. And even sometimes, winds blow our papers away when we are writing exams in the church. When rain falls, we have to run to the primary block because the whole of this place would become wet. We can’t study. All our books would be soaked,” the class prefect, Elisha Agbango, said.

One of the students, Nicholas Azobilla Akoka, expressed the wish of the entire class when he appealed to President John Dramani Mahama directly to come to their aid.

“We would be very grateful if the President of Ghana can give us a classroom block. We are not feeling comfortable here,” he said.

10 years without furniture

Until the beginning of this week, the few desks in the ‘church-classroom’ were the only furniture the school had got.

All the classrooms, from the kindergarten level to the JHS 2 class, did not have even a single dual desk. The schoolchildren were sitting on the floor to read and stretching on their bellies to write. Their books and bags were always kept within the window frames of the classrooms as there were no desks or cabinets to hold them. Authorities say the situation has been so for ten years.

“It’s affecting studies greatly,” Mr. Amidini told Starr News. “Most often, when students come and they have to lie on the floor for the whole day, they get very tired. When they lie on the floor for just about thirty minutes, they cannot concentrate,” he added.

On Monday, the SIC Life Savings and Loans Company Limited provided the school with 150 dual desks worth Gh¢40, 500:00. The company heard about the plight through a proposal put forward by the Bawku West District Assembly.

Scores of parents and opinion leaders from the community assembled under a branchy tree at the school to celebrate the relief. The strength with which the men beat the drums and the rate at which the women pounded the ground with dancing feet at musical intervals in front of their delighted kids mirrored a 'forgotten' people who had waited for a decade for aid.

“It’s part of our mandate that whilst we make profits, at least we give parts of the profits back to the community that has helped us to come this far. We also want to use the opportunity to encourage other corporate organisations across the country that if all of us are to contribute a little, I don’t think that the government has to do much more to improve the lives of the citizens. We should not just sit in Accra but we should travel and come to all the places in Ghana and contribute,” the Managing Director of the SIC Life and Savings Loans, Richard Appietu, told the gathering.

Other SIC officials at the presentation ceremony include: the Board Chairman, Aaron Issah Anafure; Customer Service and Corporate Affairs Manager, Roseline Mann; Tamale Branch Manager, Prosper Kunde-Kwallinjam; and Head of Operations, Kingsford Sapana Dengure.

Mining activities disrupt enrollment The disruption of school enrollment across the Bawku West District by mining activities is an ever-present threat.

The Member of Parliament (MP) for Zebilla, Cletus Apul Avoka, who witnessed the furniture donation ceremony, grabbed the occasion as an opportunity to remind the community of the dangers of mining on the future of their children.

He told them: “We are not going to bring chairs here for the sake of bringing chairs here. Ensure that your children come to school. Some parents even connive with their children to go to galamsey (small-scale mining) and forget about learning. President Mahama started in a community like this. I started in my community as a kid like this. It is possible that we can have a child from this school becoming a DCE, an MP or even a president. Help the teachers. The teacher cannot go from house to house bringing children to the school.”

He was accompanied by the District Chief Executive for Bawku West, Simon Ayande Agbango, and officials of the district assembly and the district’s education directorate.

How the furniture vanished

The school was established in 1962, closed down in 1974 due to extremely low enrollment and poor attendance following a rainstorm disaster that saw its roofs ripped up and reopened in 1989. It was provided with furniture from time to time. But poor maintenance and pilfering have remained a serious challenge. That is how they have always vanished.

“They used to have furniture. But they could not maintain them. And the community picked some away. We don’t have a watchman here. The whole district, I don’t think there is a watchman in any of the schools. Now that we have received this, we will organise a PTA meeting to see how we can get a watchman and pay him; or else they will just vanish again,” the headmaster, Mr. Amidini, disclosed exclusively to Starr News.

But the MP did fire a strong warning at the ground to the community that any individual or group caught tampering with the furniture would be arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned.

The SIC Life Savings and Loans Company Limited also donated 5,000 exercise books to 24 basic schools in three districts including Bawku West, Nabdam and Talensi with a promise to extend the same helping hand to the other municipalities and districts in the region.