Unusual School Prospectus

Parents of, especially, new entrants to many senior high schools are stressed, having had to contend with unusual purchases for their wards. They are seeing for the first time the demand for buckets of branded paints, plastic chairs and even bags of cement in the list of items they must buy before their children can take up residence in such schools. Now that the admission process has been completed or on the verge of doing so, they can afford to lay bare their unusual predicament at the hands of an educational system which government has promised to make friendly and affordable. We have just learnt that the plastic chairs which some schools are demanding are meant to be used in the chapels on Sundays. Bizarre eh! It appears that the Ghana Education Service (GES) is too distant from the happenings in these schools that in the bid of the headmasters to survive, they are hatching all manner of survival projects to weather the storm of the times. Some of the schools are specific in their demands, asking for only Azar Paint and others Leylac, justifiably prompting questions about whether there is a certain pact between them and the manufacturers of such brands. We hear that the demands have the blessing of Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) which, we hear, want to make for the inability of the GES to supply the needs of the schools. In such cases, we would have expected that the crazy demands be applicable to continuing students and not parents of newcomers who have already managed to pay so much for their kids. Things are so difficult in the country that such strange entries in schools� prospectuses create more challenges for the already vexed economic situation in the country. Parents who have had to dip their hands deeper into their already lean pockets must be sulking about the new predicaments they are facing in a Better Ghana template. Why the existing systems like the GETFUND cannot be made to provide paints and cement to assist public schools to fend for their development needs is something beyond our ken. Perhaps, a Better Ghana project means more demands on the citizenry, regardless of the negative effects of these. In the midst of the rancour triggered by the spectacle of students in the company of their parents porting bags of cement, buckets of Azar paints heading for their new schools, the GES is yet to come out with a convincing dissociation from the developments. It is interesting to note that the unusual demands are not limited to one school or even a region but it cuts across the country. The country-wide pervasion has pushed critics of the new system to ask whether the GES is unaware of the demands. Even as we await the usual dissociation by GES from the demands and perhaps a warning to schools to desist from asking parents to make bizarre purchases, we would continue to wonder what is really happening to Ghana�s educational system and governance in general.