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The call of duty imposes a fairly severe responsibility on all of us to protect future generations, and with that in mind, thank you for taking the time to hear the concerns about the reopening of schools in our beloved Republic.
It has been a week since the schools reopened. Before the schools reopened after almost a year since their closure following the dangers that the Covid-19 pandemic posed and continues to pose, many concerns were raised which bordered on our willingness to make such a risky decision to send our young people . back to school en masse.
The purpose of this article is to share the concerns expressed by stakeholders across Ghana:
- Inadequate and late distribution of PPE in schools. Even so, some schools have not yet received PPE; some received only disinfectants, liquid soaps, or both, but not nasal masks. In several other schools there is no running water.
In fact, the same students who should be protected have become water carriers;
- Another issue that has come to my attention is overcrowding in schools. Several classrooms, especially in public schools, are overcrowded. Reports of class sizes exceeding eighty (80) students abound. Even more worrying, the insufficient furniture, which forces three to four students to share a double office, designed for two students.
Remember that one of the critical protocols in preventing the spread of the virus; COVID 19 is social distancing. This requires all schools to ensure adherence to this protocol, and it is important that this issue be brought to the attention of the government.
- Students in the lower grades, Kindergarten (KG) to Grade 4, do not fully understand the implications of not following protocols and have been seen to play with each other, without wearing nasal masks. And you see, let’s be frank with ourselves.
Even we adults, many have had difficulty adhering to some of these protocols. Look at our public transport system, we have already allowed it to be crowded. People use this service regardless of the warnings of the new variant, even adults. How much can we not expect among our own children at this lower level of the school scale?
- Thousands of students who until then attended private schools before the advent of Covid, which led to the closure of these schools, forcing some owners to send them to other establishments and to fire teachers because the owners of these schools had no funds to maintain them, led to thousands of students stranded in their homes.
Students from some one hundred and twenty-six (126) collapsed private schools are estimated to number thirty-seven thousand (37,000), with two thousand three hundred and ninety-four (2,394) staff.
The above situation also puts more pressure on the already overcrowded public schools as parents find it difficult to fit their pupils into these schools.
Having raised these four key concerns, I would like to pose the following questions to President Akufo-Addo and the government as we all seek a safer environment for our young people who had to be at risk after the schools reopened:
a) Why did the president assure us that all arrangements were in place to reopen schools in a way that did not endanger the lives of students and pupils? The evidence suggests that the situation on the ground does not support this assurance. I am sure you have seen and heard the media report examples of unavailability or insufficiency of this basic protective equipment promised by the President before the schools reopened;
b) The government, through the Ghana Education Service (GES), has had nearly ten months to reopen the schools. Couldn’t additional spaces, even temporarily, in the form of tents, have been created to reduce the size of the classes? Couldn’t the rotation system have been introduced to help decongest schools in the short term? Couldn’t furniture have been bought to cope with the regrouping of pupils among the rare pupils of the classes? Couldn’t the PPE have been mobilized and distributed to schools at least a week before the reopening?
c) What was so convincing that the president, Nana Akufo-Addo, should have opened schools the day he did so when in fact we did not have the full makeup of protection distributed to schools? Shouldn’t he have made sure that all schools had received all the compliments of PPE before the schools opened, instead of now having to act to reach everyone after they opened?
I would like to urge all of you to join the appeals to ensure the right things are done. We have a duty to protect the lives of our children, otherwise we must face the ravages of this devastating virus, the consequences of which could be more dire than we ever imagined.
Dr Clement Abas Apaak
MP Builsa South
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