Keep Quiet Because You Don’t Understand The Community High School Concept – Hon Alex Kyeremeh Jabs Loudmouth Dr Osei Adutwum

For the past two decades, the annual demand for secondary education in Ghana has exceeded 20%. This is a result of population increase and parents’ interest in educating their children. The demand for space in SHS was becoming a big challenge due to inadequate infrastructure.

So, in 2012, after a series of stakeholder meetings, the idea of the Community Senior High School Concept came up. The idea was to establish new schools with first-class facilities like what you find in the E Blocks,closer to some communities with high numbers of JHS students.

Some of these communities were in urban, peri-urban and some deprived communities across the country. Bringing senior high school closer to the communities makes it affordable to the people and enhances community participation and ownership for effective and efficient management that had characterised these schools for better academic performance.

This Community School Concept attracted the World Bank, and they agreed to support the programme. They recommended it to many Countries using our model. It must be noted that the Ministry of Education and Ghana Education Service only identified the districts and municipalities that needed additional SHS. The Beneficial Assemblies were asked to identify communities and engage Traditional Authorities to acquire land, which should not be less than ten hectares.

The Eblocks were phase one of the project. In some communities, the idea was to add additional facilities like dormitories, dining halls, and staff bungalows. By July 2016, we started awarding contracts for some of these schools, which were at advanced stages of completion. For instance, Krobo Community School in Techiman North in Bono East got approval for the construction of 2 number dormitory blocks and dining hall and a kitchen. Funding for the Community Secondary Schools project was the Getfund and a $ 156m facility from the World Bank, so it is not true there were no funds for the project.

After 7 years, none of these facilities saw the light of day notwithstanding numerous appeals to Dr Osei Adutwum because Getfund was collateralised for $1.2 billion loan which Getfund has to pay 60% of its money to defray the loan for ten years the government is yet to publish what it used the $ 1.2 billion for again government also capped 20% of the fund to add to its unsatisfied spending.

It must be noted that as these schools were waiting for additional facilities 66 seater buses were given to all schools to bring students from nearby communities to school diary. The Minister must be bold enough to mention schools that were constructed in jingle as indicated by him when he visited Ejura. Dr Adutwum must guide his utterance because some of us will not allow him to run his mouth to cover his incompetence and lack of knowledge in the educational system in this country.

The truth of the matter is that of all the revenue and loans raked in by this government they have deliberately refused to put money into education.NDC government was able to do so much for education because it committed more than 20% of annual revenue to education. Apart from 2017, this government has committed less than 20% to education 20% is the threshold of the United Nations.

Sadly, this year, the government’s budget for education is only 14%. This is the reason they can not do any meaningful infrastructure projects in education. This is the minister who has been presiding over Basic Schools without textbooks for the past 4 years Unprecedented schools under trees, classrooms without tables and chairs also known as schools of shame courtesy of JOY TV.

For the past 3 years, more than 40,000 teachers have left the shores of this country, and this Minister and his government are able to replace only 16,000.Some schools in deprived areas are without teachers. The Minister must be told now that education in Ghana is not only SHS.