Pupils abandon school because of $1.15

Pupils of Danchira District Assembly Primary School in the Ga District of the Greater Accra Region, are abandoning school due to their inability to pay a total of ?1,343,000 being a bill of school fees submitted to the school by the Ga District Directorate of Education. Each of the 127 pupils in the school is to pay ?9,000 to raise the amount.

Miss Grace Lartey, headmistress of the school, disclosed this to the Ghanaian Times at Danchira, near Accra. She said only ?262,000 was paid by some of the pupils for the settlement of the bill. According to Ms Lartey, any time she prevailed on the pupils to bring along the District School levy, they went home and never returned. She cited an instance where a parent took offence and rained insults on her for sending her ward back home for the money.

Ms Lartey said that some parents had taken undue advantage of the situation to send their children to the River Densu for fishing or farming. She said that in cases where the children later returned to school they were unable to cope with the work in the classroom.

The headmistress was not happy about the lack of accommodation facilities for teachers in the school. She said that the teachers mostly came from Accra and other surrounding areas, spending an average of ?100,000 on transportation monthly.

She appealed to the authorities and non-governmental organisations to come to the aid of the school by assisting them with footballs, jerseys, school band and other recreational facilities to make the place attractive for the pupils.