From Pokrom To Presec–A Test Case For Free SHS

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Category: The ClassRoom

Created on Saturday, 08 December 2012 00:00

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From Pokrom To Presec–A Test Case For Free SHS

I am writing this piece fully satisfied as journalist who through my pen was able to greatly affect the life of young Ebenezer Ampofo. Sixteen-year-old Ebenezer Ampofo is in his second year at Presbyterian Boys Senior High School at Legon in Accra and had six ‘ones’ in the 2011 Basic School Certificate Examination (BECE) having attended L/A Junior High School at Pokrom-Nsaba, a small farming community in the Akuapem South district of the Eastern region.

{sidebar id=4 align=right}He had one in Mathematics, English Language, Integrated Science, Social Studies, ICT and Pre-technical skills and had 3 in Religious studies and 4 in Akuapem Twi and became an instant role model for junior high school students in the village.

Ebenezer chose Presbyterian Boys’ Senior High School (PRESEC) at Legon in Accra, which undoubtedly is one of the best senior schools in the country, because of the his strong conviction in his intellectual ability.

Ebenezer’s teachers also had the same belief in him and did not stop him from choosing such a ‘high’ school as a student from a ‘village’ school.

His assistant head teacher, Felix Tretu who teaches Mathematics told me that they realized Ebenezer was an exceptional student academically and therefore offered whatever assistance he needed to prove a point.

“Ebenezer was always seen with his books studying and while in class he asked brilliant and intelligent questions,” Mr Tretu told me pointing out that they were surprised when Ebenezer had excellent grades in the BECE. His results were obviously the best the school had ever produced.

Ebenezer thus qualified for senior high school and PRESEC by courtesy of his excellent grades. PRESEC, the school of every student’s choice, accordingly offered him admission. He was required to pay GHC450 for his admission but unfortunately his parents did not have the money to pay and see him through senior high school.

Ebenezer’s dream of becoming a doctor looked completely shattered but God had a plan for Ebenezer, who was innocently a devout Christian.

The Almighty God directed him was to seek financial support from philanthropists to enable him continue with his education and realize his dream.

One day in March, 2011 at about 7.30am, I had a call and thought it was one of such calls seeking to arrange for media coverage. When I picked up the phone, a baritone voice on the other side greeted me.

The caller identified himself as Ebenezer Ampofo who was calling from Pokrom-Nsaba in the Eastern region. He continued that he had just finished his junior high school education but his parents were unable to send him to senior high school because they did not have the means.

I tried to enquire where Pokrom was because that was the first time I had heard about the name of the town even though I had been working in the Eastern region for six years. He told me it was in the Akuapem South district located on the main road from Aburi to Nsawam.

He politely and forcefully asked me if I could assist him by making his plight known to members of the public through my paper. I then asked him the grades he got at the BECE. Ampofo confidently told me he had six ones. I was shocked because it was rare for students in schools in rural communities to get such brilliant results.

My first thought of him was that the chap might be an exceptional student. To be able to score six ones from an L/A school means he must be an extraordinary student with shining quality. When I asked him how he got my number he said he saw it at the imprint of the Daily Guide newspaper. I was immediately touched by the boy’s story and readily offered to assist him to achieve his dreams.

I told him to come to Koforidua and I would do the little in my power to help him by publicizing his plight and letting members of the public know about him so that they would offer him the assistance he needed to be able to go to school to realize his dreams.

Ever since the boy called for the first time I never heard from him again. I wondered why he failed to follow up on his request.

Almost seven months after that ‘appointed’ call, I had a call again but this time round a more mature person who identified himself as an ICT teacher of Ebenezer Ampofo.

Mr Emmanuel Addy was his name and he told me he was in Koforidua with Ebenezer to buy a trunk, mattress, bedsheet and other personal effects which Ebenezer Ampofo would need in school and that they wanted to see me urgently.

It was an unexpected call so I quickly arranged and met them at a designated location at Koforidua. When I went I saw Ebenezer who looked very innocent and his teacher who also looked very young.

The teacher, who identified himself as Emmanuel Addy, said they were sorry to call on me at such an eleventh hour as Ebenezer was preparing to go to school.

According to him, it was clear that the parents would not be in a position to pay for his first term school fees and subsequent funding of their son’s education in the next three years so the teachers in the school decided to contribute something ‘little’ to be able to buy mattress, school uniform, and some immediate needs to enable Ebenezer to go to school for the meantime.

Paying for the main school fees was still a problem so they wanted me to go ahead and do the publication for public assistance.

I went ahead and did the publication for him and the story had instant impact. People started calling to offer help and one of such people who initially called was Mr Jerry Asare of Kumasi Asante Kotoko fame who promised to give 1,000 Ghana cedis and take full responsibility for Ebenezer’s education at the senior high level.

Many other public-spirited individuals called to support. Some of them came to fulfill their promises while others failed to live up to their words.

Apart from the money donated by Mr Asare, individuals and groups also donated up to 1,000 Ghana cedis to support Ebenezer’s education.

All the money was put in the care of the school chaplain who was to manage the funds on behalf of Ebenezer.

When I first went to PRESEC in the company of Mr Addy, Ampofo’s ICT teacher and met with the school chaplain together with Ampofo’s housemaster to tell them about the story of Ebenezer and the possibility of them exercising direct supervision over his activities in school, Ampofo’s housemaster, Rev Dompreh Brakoh remarked “wow, there must be something unique about this boy because not everybody could get such opportunity and assistance.”

He told us that the school had a special thanksgiving service for first year students to officially admit them and also give them the opportunity to give thanks to God for the rare opportunity offered them to pursue their education in such a distinguished school and while at the thanksgiving service, he, together with other masters, observed something unusual and that was the way Ebenezer Ampofo carried himself and how he danced at the thanksgiving service.

According to the housemaster, Ebenezer Ampofo was uniquely dressed wearing long pair of socks and his baggy pair of shorts pulled up to the middle section of his stomach unlike many other students.

“Ampofo was innocently raw and during the dancing section we saw this young man creating a whole territory for himself in the assembly hall and really dancing his heart out while other students felt shy to dance”.

Ampofo’s attitude could simply sum up his joy and his gratitude to God for giving him such an awesome opportunity to attend PRESEC, one of the prestigious schools in Ghana.

Mr Jerry Asare, as promised has taken full responsibility for the welfare and education of Ebenezer Ampofo and whenever school is on vacation, he stays with his family in Accra.

After helping to get Ampofo into PRESEC, I had always said to myself if such a divine door was not open to Ampofo where would he have been by now.

Ampofo’s story could be more divine but some other students he completed school with who had between aggregates 15 and 20 and were equally qualified for Senior High School could not go to school because their parents did not have the money to send them.

This real story of Ampofo brings to the fore the need for Ghanaians to dispassionately assess the free senior high school education being touted by the flag bearer of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).

The issue here is not about the quality but the sustainability of the funding for such a policy.

I sincerely believe the policy is very laudable because it will afford qualified senior high school students opportunity to get free and quality secondary school education.

I am saying the same quality education because even though it is free, government will bear all the cost that will come with that level of education meaning parents are no longer going to pay as they use to.

When we were in the sixth form, education was free because government was paying bursaries for all sixth-formers and the quality was never compromised.

In the same way government will take up all the expenses in this policy that Akufo-Addo is talking about which parents would have otherwise been burdened with and the quality will remain the same.

This free senior high school policy is absolutely very laudable and all Ghanaians must embrace it because the cost of education is increasingly high-rocketing and will definitely bring great relief to parents if such cost is absorbed by the government.

Apart from being free, students who will benefit from it will be more patriotic and nationalistic because they would realize that at a certain stage of their education, the state bore all the expenses and their loyalty to the state will be non-negotiable and unwavering.

By Thomas Fosu Jnr

Source: Dail Guide

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Anyone against free SHS is a nation wrecker - Osafo Maafo

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Category: The ClassRoom

Created on Saturday, 24 November 2012 00:00

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Anyone against free SHS is a nation wrecker - Osafo Maafo

Former Education and Sports Minister, Yaw Osafo Maafo has described those opposed to the New Patriotic Party (NPP's) free Senior High School (SHS) education policy as “nation wreckers”.

According to him, such pessimists who do not have the foresight and vision to accelerate the nation development should be ignored.

Yaw Osafo Maafo was reacting to recent prediction by President John Mahama that the NPP’s free SHS policy will fail.

Citing examples in Kenya and Uganda, the President said because these countries did not provide the needed infrastructure and resources before implementing the policy, they were now struggling.

Addressing a rally at Okere in the Eastern Region, President Mahama reiterated his government's commitment to expand infrastructure at the secondary level.

But speaking on Asempa FM’s Ekosii Sen programme Friday, Yaw Osafo Maafo said the president appeared to be a prophet of doom.

He indicated that for political expediency, members of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) had a psychological orientation that the free SHS was not possible and had been so fixated in this mentality that they could not be persuaded by even reasoned arguments.

The former Education Minister noted that if a country like Botswana has been able to successfully implement a free SHS policy, he did not see why Ghana, the first African country to gain independence could not do it.

Osafo Maafo said an Akufo-Addo presidency will make judicious use of the oil revenue by investing in education to benefit all Ghanaians.

He intimated that the NDC had driven the country into economic, social and political abyss and that it will only take a visionary and a more competent leader like Nana Akufo-Addo to pull the nation back from the brink.

Osafo Maafo urged all members and sympathizers of the NPP to work hard to achieve success and called on the electorate to vote the party into power.

He was optimistic that the NPP will come out victorious on December 7.

Source: thestatesmanonline.com

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Gov't Acknowledges Inconsistencies In Better Ghana Laptops Recipients List

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Category: The NoticeBoard

Created on Saturday, 24 November 2012 00:00

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Gov't Acknowledges Inconsistencies In Better Ghana Laptops Recipients List

The Ministry of Environment Science and Technology (MEST) says it has come to its notice that the Better Ghana ICT Project beneficiaries published in the Ghanaian Times and the Daily Graphic have some inconsistencies.

This was contained in a press release issued by the Ministry and copied to the Ghana News agency (GNA) on Saturday.

According to the release, the list of student beneficiaries from the Pentecost University College had been inadvertently exchanged with that of the Presbyterian University College.

The MEST wishes to assure the general public that all anomalies regarding the publication of the Better Ghana ICT Project beneficiaries would be rectified.

“We also wish to state that there are built-in mechanisms in the distribution system of the laptops to ensure that only the beneficiaries of the Better Ghana ICT Project will benefit as they will present their current student identity cards before collecting the laptops,” the release added.

Source: GNA/Ghana

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NDC Ghost ‘Schools Under Trees’ Exposed

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Category: The WorkShop

Created on Thursday, 22 November 2012 00:00

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NDC Ghost ‘Schools Under Trees’ Exposed

{sidebar id=10 align=right}IT IS fast unfolding that claims by the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) that it has eliminated 1,700 schools under trees, as captured in the party’s much-discredited ‘Green Book’, are exaggerated myths throughout the country.

Information available to DAILY GUIDE indicates that some of the schools purportedly built by the NDC administration under the schools-under-trees programme were either constructed during the erstwhile New Patriotic Party (NPP) regime, by NGOs, churches; or they were not even schools under trees as tagged.

For instance, Amoamang Methodist Primary in the Nsuta-Kwamang Beposo in the Sekyere Central District in the Ashanti Region listed in NDC’s Green Book was not a school under any tree.

According to the NDC, “schools under trees” were areas where trees were used as shelter for teaching and learning.

However, speaking to DAILY GUIDE in a telephone conversation on Tuesday, Deputy Minister of Information Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa explained that apparently, the term “school under trees” did not mean literal schools situated under trees; they comprised schools that were merely renovated and not necessarily constructed from the scratch.

“Schools under trees are generic terms used,” he told DAILY GUIDE.

“The school under trees concept is a concept for schools in dilapidated condition-in conditions which are inhabitable. Some are under trees, some are even under sheds,” he explained.

About two weeks ago, Okudzeto Ablakwa released a list of 600 schools out of 1,700 that the NDC government claimed it had constructed. This has been dismissed as a hoax as some of the listed schools have been challenged by the owners, mostly churches.

The Danquah Institute estimates that the new schools that the NDC has actually constructed since 2009 are 400 and not the 1,700 it has trumpeted all along.

Cost

Even though he is one of the strongest advocates of the schools under trees policy, when pressed by DAILY GUIDE, Okudzeto admitted that he did not have an idea of the total cost of all the schools under trees that the NDC claimed it had removed. According to him, he would have to make a special request at the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFUND) to get the cost of all school buildings.

“My focus now has been to put out the 1,775, but I have not really considered the cost element,” the deputy minister told DAILY GUIDE.

These curious gaps have led critics to conclude that the whole policy was just a big hoax.

The Member of Parliament for Nsuta-Kwamang Beposo, Kwame Osei-Prempeh, told DAILY GUIDE that the six-unit classroom block at the Amoamang Methodist Primary in the Sekyere Central District that the NDC was laying claims to, was in fact constructed in 2002 by the Kufuor administration and the MP personally added a six-room teachers’ quarters to it.

Also listed in the Green Book is an existing three-classroom Kruwi Primary school in the area which was just renovated by the District Assembly.

Presby Church Protest

Just recently, Osu Presbyterian Church exposed the ruling NDC for listing Presbyterian schools that had been in existence for decades as some of the schools under trees.

The list had the Osu Presby Boys’ Primary, Osu Presby Girls’ Primary/JHS and Osu Salem ’5' Primary on it. The church said the schools had classrooms for a very long time.

The District Minister of the Osu Ebenezer Presby Church, Reverend Dr. Nana Opare Kwakye, said government only offered to renovate the schools.

“It was an existing building, not a school under a tree. Government only helped to refurbish the building by re-roofing and changing door locks,” he told Citi FM.

Rev Kwakye added, “The Osu Presby Cluster of Schools are very old schools and most of the people in the church and community have come from that school so these are not schools under trees.”

Indeed, the immediate past Greater Accra regional minister and NDC MP for Korle Klotey, Nii Armah Ashietey, attended Osu Salem school.

More groups have continued to question the credibility of the governing NDC’s so-called schools under trees as the Abuakwa South constituency NPP has also challenged the ruling party on the unending controversy.

A statement jointly issued by Solomon Y. Adjei and Julius Okyere, Abuakwa South Constituency Chairman and Communications Officer respectively, indicated that East Akyem Municipal Assembly Schools captured by NDC’s Green Book were never “schools under trees”.

“We have noted with concern, the list of the purported basic schools ‘under trees’ eliminated by the NDC Government in the East Akyem Municipal Assembly, in the Abuakwa South Constituency of the Eastern Region. We would want to state categorically that Akim Adukrom L. A. Primary and Asikam Primary (which are the only two schools published in the list under my jurisdiction in the Abuakwa South Constituency) were never schools under trees,” the NPP officials revealed.

According to the NPP officials, NDC had only added two schools to the old ones, inviting the media to independently inspect both the old and new facilities.

NDC Propaganda

They called on the NDC administration to distinguish between the normal courses of upgrading existing schools from the distinct programme of eliminating schools under trees since the old structures were definitely not trees.

“It must be noted that the only two schools mentioned as being schools under trees eliminated by government in the East Akyem Municipality are false and therefore claims of elimination of schools under trees in other districts and municipalities leaves much to be desired or may be blatant lies,” they pointed.

They asked the NDC administration to desist from lies and propaganda since they would ultimately catch up with them, urging Ghanaians to embrace the free SHS education policy of the NPP by voting out “the dishonest and incompetent NDC government”.

Mr Osei-Prempeh has described NDC as a party whose only policies are propaganda, insults and lies.

“When they (NDC) tell lies, they forget that the people are able to see through the lies. Again, NDC has a policy just to attack the good policies of the NPP so that if they get power they would copy out policies,” he said.

Reiterating the need for free SHS, Mr Osei-Prempeh pointed out that President John Mahama did not know there were many Senior High Schools in the country which were virtually empty whilst Junior High School leavers could not enter SHS because of fees.

Kwame Osei-Prempeh, who is also the Chairman of the Subsidiary Legislation Committee of Parliament, further described NDC adverts on free SHS and education in general as “lies and deception”.

He observed that whilst the NDC was promising to build 10 teacher-training colleges, all the colleges in Ghana were under enrolment because of the quota system imposed on these institutions.

For instance, Osei-Prempeh said, St. Monica’s Training College at Asante Mampong, which can admit 400 students, is allowed to take only 250.

The situation, he further pointed out, existed in all the 38 training colleges and therefore classrooms and dormitories were lying idle.

An NPP administration under the leadership of Nana Akufo-Addo, he promised, would fill all the vacancies in the training colleges to train more highly motivated teachers in the country.

Source: Awudu Mahama and Raphael Ofori-Adeniran

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