Gowrie Senior High/ Technical School in the Upper East Region, has been confronted with acute infrastructure deficit. While over 600 male students are managing just one dilapidated dormitory, the female students are left to their fate as most of them resort to sleeping in the veranda of the dining hall of the school.
Not even the conversion of some classrooms into dormitories could solve the dire accommodation challenges bedeviling the girls in the school.
The Headmistress of the school,Margaret Akaribo, made this known at the launch of the school's Silver Jubilee anniversary in Gowrie of the Upper East Region.
According to her, she feared the phenomenon could reverse the sterling academic performance of students of the school. The deficiency, she noted, also posed health hazards to the students as they were left at the mercy of mosquitoes when sleeping in the open.
Mrs. Akaribo also mentioned other peculiar and devastating challenges facing the school as limited classrooms, lack of administration block, lack of a befitting science laboratory, limited staff accommodation, lack of a fence wall to restrain the bad nuts from going outside the campus haphazardly, among others.
She, therefore, appealed to the Ghana Education Service, GES and government to intervene to ease the infrastructure plight of the school.
"The school is highly deficient in boarding facilities:-the girls virtually have no dormitory while the boys population has out spaced the only dormitory block.
"Though an 18-unit classroom block project is under execution, the project appears to be abandoned by the contractor, leaving the classroom space a huge challenge", she pointed out.
She further stressed the issue had compelled some students to leave the school unceremoniously, while some prospective students turned down admissions into the school by virtue of its enormous brouhaha.
Mrs. Akaribo described the academic performance of the school in the West African Secondary School Certificate Examinations, WASSCE, as 'good' and urged the students to take their studies seriously in order to maintain and improve the status quo.
The Bongo District Director of Education, Duncan Nsor, pledged his outfit would soon meet the District Chief Executive, DCE, for Bongo, Alexis Ayamdor and other development experts in the region, so " they will jaw-jaw in relieving the nearly 2000 student populated school of its pathetic plight".
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