The absence of elective mathematics, chemistry, and biology teachers in the Bunkpurugu Senior High Technical School in the Northern region threatens quality teaching and learning there.
The school has therefore entrusted the herculean task of teaching biology and chemistry into the hands of two teachers without specialty in those subjects.
The Bunkpurugu Senior High Technical School was established in 1991, the school currently has a student population of 1,724 comprising 842 females and 882 males.
The school has hostel facilities but they are heavily congested.
Lessons begin at exactly 7:00am each day and ends at 1:45pm with two breaks at 10:00am and 12:00 noon.
Unfortunately, some lessons are missed by some students due to eating pattern during break, which has existed over years.
At the dinning hall, there are not enough tables and due to that meals are served on bare floor and in turns.
“Students eat in batches, one would wonder why students eat in batches even in the open, but the reason is that, we have limited tables to put the meals on because most of the tables are broken down so some students have to wait whilst others serve their meals, then they also take over when their colleagues are done serving their meals,” Headmaster of the school Mohammed Ayanah revealed.
“This routine affects us so much because some of the students take their meals to the dormitories to eat and you can’t control the time spent but if it was in a dinning hall, you give them twenty minutes and it is twenty minutes.
“We have over hundred metal tables which we made for dinning in the store house but you can’t carry them out each dinning time and send them back, that will be more work and more time consuming so the school has decided to leave them until our dinning hall is completed”, the Headmaster said.
Meanwhile, construction of the multi-purpose dinning hall the headmaster is banking his hopes on, with a sitting capacity of about 2000, has stalled.
Academic Challenges
Academically, the school is known as one of the best in the Northern region, but inadequate teachers is hampering academic activities in the school.
Ideally, the school needs at least 68 teaching staff but it currently depends on the services of 42 teachers, with a short fall of 26.
The school currently depends on non-specialized teaching staff to augment teaching and learning.
“We lack Elective Mathematics, Chemistry, and Biology teachers, we have never had these teachers since the establishment of this school per our records meanwhile these subjects are part of the study areas, per the Ghana Education Service teachers allocation policy, we are supposed to have 6 Integrated Science teachers but we have 2, Mathematics teachers are 3 instead of 8, and 1 teacher for Information Communication Technology instead of 4.
“With all these challenges, we are able to produce some of the finest students who get straight admissions into universities in the country, we currently have eleven students in the Kwame Nkrumah University with a total of five in the country’s premier university, University of Ghana, Legon out of the total of 506 students who completed this year,” Mr Mohammed Ayanah remarked.
Meanwhile, the school’s authorities through internally generated funds constructed a school library and stocked it with stationery.
By Zubaida Ismail |3news.com