PTA kitchen converted to boys’ dormitory at Paga SHS

A kitchen facility built by the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) of Paga Senior High School in the Kasena/Nankana West District of the Upper East Region now serves as a boys’ dormitory.

The two -room slightly large kitchen facility initially built to cook and serve meals to students now houses over a hundred male students of the school due to the lack of boys’ dormitory. The rather too small old kitchen now turned dormitory is choked up making several students seek for rented rooms outside the school premises.

According to a deep throat source, the school being a young one is faced with many challenges, making the process of teaching and learning difficult. The source named the lack of portable drinking water, teachers bungalows, classrooms and land encroachment as the major problems facing the school.

" There was the need to get a dormitory for the boys but he school had no building apart from that kitchen put up by the PTA. So it was converted even though it's too small and crowded. As at now, three teachers live here on campus with their families in a single bungalow. The teachers even had to complete the rest of the building because it was not completely built when they moved in. Housing is really a challenge here for both teachers and students, " the source revealed.

A single bore-hole provided by WorldVision in 2014 also serves the entire school. Members of the community also depend on this same bore-hole for drinking water. This creates so much pressure on the single water source which already looks weak especially in the mornings when students need to bath for classes, sometimes degenerating into fights between students and community members.

Men also use the location of the borehole as it sits right in front of the girls’ compound dormitory, under the pretext of fetching water to lure the school girls away.

"There's a single bore-hole here that serves the whole school. People from this community also fetch water from this bore-hole. This has caused a lot of problems as students get in to petty fights with members of the community. Our young girls are also carried away nightly by men who pretend to fetch water from the bore-hole which is just in front of their hostel," the source said.

Unlike their male counterparts, the female students are ‘somewhat’ lucky to have a two- classroom block facility converted into a compound dormitory but have no decent bathhouses and toilet facilities. An open structure behind the dormitory is what they make use of as a bathhouse. This according to source has caused infections among students. This has also left school authorities with no choice except to make students sit for lessons in an uncompleted one storey block.



The Paga Senior High School was absorbed by the government of Ghana in 2013 under the then NDC administration but very little has since changed. A project of the 200-day Senior High school E-school blocks promised by the NDC government is about 85% complete. Our source says the contractor has abandoned the premises even though not so much work was left of the building.

Checks at the E-block revealed that everything was almost done expect for interior fittings, painting, electrification and window fittings.

"Just look at this block, it's called the e-block and it is about 85% complete. It's a huge building that could have solved the problems of classroom space but the contractor is not on site. It's been very long since we saw anyone working on this project. I want to believe this is due to the change in government," the source said.