St. Mary’s Girls’ SHS cries for help over snake infestation, infrastructure

Though St. Mary’s Girls’ Senior High School is the best performing school in the Asante Akim Central Municipality, it continues to suffer from lack of infrastructure.

The School which currently has 930 students has just one dormitory housing all 700 boarding students, and this is a worry to the Headmistress, Alice Martha Adjei who spoke to Starr News in an interview at the school premises.

Snake invasion

Madam Alice disclosed that students have to contend with killing snakes on an almost daily basis.

She said, “sometimes when you come here in the afternoon or evening, you will find snakes in the classrooms or the dormitory. The last time we killed about three snakes in this school so we are looking for a solution to it”.

Bombata Laboratory usage

Though the school is doing well in terms of science, the school has no science laboratory of its own.

According to the Headmistress, students often spend about 45 minutes travelling to the Bombata Senior High School for practical science lessons.

She revealed, “my students are doing very well in the sciences though we don’t have our own laboratory here. Sometimes we will have to buy the chemicals and use one of the classrooms as a make-shift lab to help the students do their practicals. We wanted to use the Konongo Senior High School which is a resource centre but due to the numbers who use the place, we had to look round and finally got Bombata Senior High to agree for us to use their laboratory”.

Plywood room for Senior Housemistress

Due to the absence of bungalows for teachers to live on campus, all the teachers live in rented apartments in town and this makes it difficult for supervision of students. This pushed the senior Housemistress of the school to request for a plywood partition of the only dormitory, to serve as an apartment for her to live with the students.

“As I speak to you the senior Housemistress is the only teacher who lives with the students here. She had to tell me to use plywood to create a room for her from the dormitory here and with the support of her husband she now lives with them, ” the Headmistress disclosed.

Lack of furniture

Aside from 100 mono desks presented to the school by the Asante Akim Central Municipal Assembly, the students are depending on plastics chairs donated to the school by parents without tables.

“Our students have to put their books on their laps while writing because the only furniture available are the plastic chairs donated by parents and 100 mono desks donated by the assembly”.