GES Justifies Dismissal Of 250 Labone Students

The Ghana Education Service (GES) has explained that the agreement regarding the regulations in schools to which students and parents append their signatures at the time of admission remains a legally binding document throughout the students� stay in school. According to the acting Director-General of GES, Mr Charles Aheto-Tsegah, every school had rules and regulations that governed the training of students and that at any point in time when those regulations were called into question, they were binding on the parties that signed it. Mr Aheto-Tsegah, who was speaking in an interview with the Daily Graphic following the dismissal of 250 students of the Labone Senior High School (SHS) for abysmal academic performance, said it would have been a different case if parents had not signed any agreement to that effect and their children had been dismissed for poor performance. Legal document �Before admission, you are given a prospectus that sets out the rules and regulations of the school which parents read, sign and have their children admitted. It is a legal document and you sign it knowing that the school can transform your child. If your child is not living up to expectation and the agreement takes effect, then you run to the media,� he said. He said as far as practicable, rules and regulations that governed the training of students to achieve the set objectives of a school were permissible and did not understand why parents had to run to the media to resolve such matters. Parents� attitude For him, it was regrettable that following the inability of the children to live up to expectation, the school had invited the parents concerned to a meeting to discuss the way forward but they had failed to attend, thereby giving the school no option but to enforce the agreement. The Daily Graphic Thursday carried a story in which 250 students of the Labone SHS were said to have been sacked for their performance in the end-of-year examination in July this year. The students, who had an average of four failures in eight subjects, were sent packing when the first term of the 2014/2015 academic year began. Out of the number sacked, 155 of them were second-year students who were supposed to go to Form Three, while 95 were first-year students entering their second year. Also, 171 students who had an average of three failures in the examination have been asked to repeat their forms. About 800 Form Two students of the school entered Form Three, while the number of first years who went to second year was 1,000. School policy The action, according to the Headmistress of the school, Mrs Mary Amankwah, was in line with the school�s policy agreed upon by both the students and their parents at the time of their admission. Mrs Amankwah told the Daily Graphic in an interview that part of the prospectus of the school clearly stated that if a student had three failures in an end-of-term examination, he or she would be sacked from the school. That portion of the agreement, she said, was signed by both parents and students.