Female boarding students of Kajaji Senior High School in the Sene East District of the Bono Region sleep in an abandoned GETFUND dormitory block due to infrastructural crises in the school.
The girl’s dormitory block has not been plastered or furnished for use but being occupied by students posted to the school as boarders.
Male boarding students are also being accommodated in an abandoned classroom facility converted into a dormitory.
Kajaji SHS has a total student population of 1,100 out of which 822 are boarders but the dormitory facilities are uncompleted. Most of the students are from Ashanti, Bono, Ahafo, Savannah, Upper west, Oti, and other parts of the country.
A two-storey administrative, one storey dormitory, and a 12 units storey classroom blocks started in 2010 and reached various levels of completion have all been abandoned worsening the accommodation crises owing to exponential increase in students’ population due to the free senior high school policy.
Boarding students at Kajaji SHS attend dining under deplorable pavilion which also serves as classroom due to lack of dining hall. Many stand to eat their meals as a result of inadequate dining tables and chairs.
Dining sometimes delays whenever it rains because the cooks have no kitchen hence prepare food in the open.
Teachers are not left out in the infrastructural crises. Apart from the assistant headmaster and senior housemaster occupying the only completed bungalow on campus, the rest of the 58-teaching staff are struggling for accommodation.
A two-semidetached bungalow project started in 2010 by GETFUND has also been abandoned but being occupied by the Housemistress and her assistant with the rest of the teachers and the headmaster staying relatively far places.
Despicably, Kajaji SHS offers pure science course but lacks science laboratory.
The school does not also have a computer laboratory.
The headmaster of the school mostly runs administrative errands with motorbike and taxi as the engine of Mahindra vehicle given to the school in 2008 malfunctions.
Students of Kajaji SHS are transported in commercial vehicles to events due to the lack of functioning school bus.
In May 2020, the Bono East Regional Minister, Mr Kwasi Adu Gyan assured the chiefs and people of Kajaji that the government was going to complete the abandoned infrastructure projects in the school after the chiefs lamented neglect of the projects by government.
However, for almost a year after the promise, absolutely nothing has been done.
The Chairman of the Parents Teachers Association,Sampa Bright told Starr News, the school has written several letter to the Ministry of Education through the District Education directorate with pictures of the challenges attached but to no avail.
According to him, PTA is helpless due to government directives barring them from levying parents.
“the students and teachers in the school are really suffering due to the accommodation crises .In fact the school doesn’t have anything and all GETFUND Projects started under the late President Mills government have all been abandoned. So we are pleading to government to come to the aid of the school because these students write same exams with their colleague in other schools but look at the inequality and the enormity of he challenges”. He told Starr News
Source: Ghana/Starrfm.com.gh/Kojo Ansah
