CHASS appeals for release of feeding grants

Mrs Cecilia Kwakye Cofie, National President of the Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS) has appealed to the government to release the two terms feeding grants for schools in the Upper East, Upper West and Northern regions to enable academic work to progress smoothly.

She said the feeding grants had been in arrears for more than two terms creating administrative and financial difficulties for schools in those regions saying, “Heads of schools do not have the peace to deliver on their core mandate since they constantly suffer harassment from goods and service providers”.

Mrs Cofie made the appeal in Tamale on Tuesday during the opening ceremony of the 53rd annual conference of CHASS, which is being attended by over 560 heads of second-cycle institutions across the country to review modalities of administering their schools for quality education.

“In fact some suppliers have threatened court action…the crux of the matter is that somebody must pay for the quality education,” she stated.

Mrs Cofie also expressed worry over non-payment of absorbed fees saying that the absorbed fees were items originally placed on the bills of students which government took the decision to absorb but had failed to remit the schools, plunging them into financial difficulties.

“We urgently need these absorbed fees to enable us to settle our indebtedness and also pay taxes on goods and services to the Ghana Revenue Authority to avoid embarrassment at the Public Accounts Committee,” she said.

She noted that in the current circumstance of erratic power outages, "CHASS is appealing to the authorities to provide Senior High Schools with solar panels and solar street lights to prevent students from indulging in immoral activities at night". Mrs Cofie bemoaned the installation of commercial electricity prepaid meters in all classrooms, dormitories and all other facilities in the schools, and appealed for them to be replaced with residential prepaid meters to enhance academic work.

She said the practice where issues of educational institutions were debated in the media created opportunity for parents and students to lambast head teachers, which makes the public to ridicule them and appealed to the media to be circumspect in discussing educational issues.

Professor Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang, the Minister of Education who opened the conference, promised to address the concerns of the feeding grants and the absorbed fees that had been in arrears, but noted that government was not finding it easy in the face of the financial challenges affecting the country.

She said as part of introducing innovations into teaching, government has in the past few years embarked on major institutional refresher training for teachers especially those teaching mathematics and science with the hope of improving the performances of students and entreated the heads of the various schools to monitor those teachers for improved performances.

She indicated that because of the high levels of indiscipline in the country’s schools, teenage pregnancy was increasing at an alarming rate and warned teachers who might be perpetrators to such acts to desist before the law dealt with them ruthlessly.

Prof. Agyemang bemoaned the alarming rate of examination leakages in the country and appealed to parents not to indulge in any examination malpractices saying, “I will not hesitate to recommend cancelation of any exams that is leaked”.