Akyem Apreade JHS requests govt’s intervention

The management of the Akyem Apreade District Assembly Junior High School is appealing to the government to urgently intervene to help address the depressing condition under which pupils in the school are studying.

Pupils of the school continue to study under makeshift facility which is at the mercy of the weather, while a newly completed three-unit classroom block with ancillary facility on the school compound meant for the pupils remain locked since August 2014.

This is because the contractor who constructed the school building had not been paid and so had refused to hand over the keys to the building.

Meanwhile, the Parent-Teacher-Association of the school has threatened to break the locks of the new structure to allow the pupils access to the classrooms to learn, since their efforts to get the District Chief Executive (DCE) of Birim South to intervene had yielded no result.

According to a 16-year-old JHS one pupil, the school, established in 1976 in the Birim South District of the Eastern Region, with the aim of making education accessible to the children in Apreade and the surrounding communities, rather makes education distasteful to them due to the dilapidated nature of the present school structure.

The Akyem Apreade D/A school initially operated kindergarten and primary one to six without a JHS, until 2013 when management of the school, the Ghana Education Service and the District Assembly agreed on an improvised structure to accommodate the JHS department for 2014 academic year.

This was because after class six, pupils had to walk long distances to junior high schools far away from the community, which turn to discourage them and so many ended up dropping out of school.

At the moment, there have been new JHS one entrants while the previous ones are now in JHS two but there is still no classroom for them.

Management of the school has therefore been compelled to combine primary one and two to make way for the JHS two.

However, the Birim South District Assembly could not indicate when funds would be available to pay the contractor

Meanwhile, the JHS pupils, who fear their educational dreams hang in the air due to lack of proper teaching and learning infrastructure, told the Ghana News Agency’s(GNA) reporter that they intended to leave the school if the situation was not resolved.

Moving round the structure, the Ghana News Agency’s reporter observed that, the washroom which is part of the new block but detached, had not been completed, with its manholes open and posing danger to the kindergarten children whose classrooms are near the open manholes.

The Headmaster of the School, Mr Godwin Narh, requested the government to urgently come to the aid of the school.

He also entreated philanthropists and corporate organizations to come and assist the school with a library block, books, computers and also to get the school connected to the national grid to enable them use any computer that would be donated to the school.