Pope John SHS students boycott breakfast

Students of Pope John Senior High School in the Eastern regional town of Koforidua boycotted their breakfast on Monday over what they described as ‘malnourished food’.

Hoping for an improved menu as Ghana celebrated Founder’s Day on Monday, the students were heartbroken to discover they had to make do with two ladles of ‘Tom brown’ without bread.

Expressing displeasure and disappointment, the students threw away the porridge whilst others walked away from the dining hall shouting and chanting anti-management slogans.

The students have been eating breakfast without bread since last term, a student told Multimedia’s Maxwell Kudelor on condition of anonymity.

Often times, the breakfast is also without milk. The teenager said it is often unable to sustain them till lunch at 2pm. As a result, when the situation continued this term, the students decided they had had enough.

It is believed leaders of the students are planning to lead their colleagues on a demonstration in the coming weeks.

Management has been tight-lipped over the incident but some school teachers have revealed that the school is in financial crisis.

According to some management members, the less than GHc3 paid as feeding fee for each student per day is woefully inadequate.

Some heads of Senior High Schools have been begging government to release funds to pay for fees it has absorbed because they can no longer bear the constant harassment they face from suppliers.

“For more than two terms, heads of schools do not have the peace to deliver their core mandate,” the President of the Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS), Cecilia Kwakye, recently said at a conference.

“Some [suppliers] have threatened court action,” she had complained, describing the situation in the northern sector as “urgent”.

Cecilia Kwakye said students do not appreciate the funding challenges administrators face and therefore go to violent extremes when their feeding, which is funded by government, suffers.

In fact, some heads of schools have had their properties and homes vandalised by hungry and angry students in the past.

The President of CHASS has asked government to scrap the subventions and have students pay if it cannot sustain the programme.