Agandaa Primary School need attention

They dress up and go to school every morning. They recite poems and rhymes and dance happily in the morning.

They don’t like the sun much as they huddle up in one corner of their classroom where there is shade. A part of the roof is blown off.

A part of the roof is blown off

This is the plight of pupils at the Agandaa Primary School at Kandiga in the  WKasena-Nankanaest District of the Upper East Region of Ghana.

Pupils here have to sometimes turn their backs to their blackboard in order to stay in the little shade that is left inside their classrooms.

The school is a brown mud structure with only four classrooms with weak walls. There are several cracks on them.

When it is passed mid-day, pupils in primary 1, 2 and 3 classes do all they can to avoid getting scorched by the sun rays penetrating through the open roof into their classrooms.

The headmaster of the Agandaa Primary School, Gilbert Atanga said the situation seriously affects learning.

Atanga said, “The children sit round and we use the shadows (of the walls) as our sitting points. The roof is blown off so when the sun reflects here, what do we do? We have to shift the children to where the shade is”.

They have to shift the children to where the shade is

He added that “at a point, the shade will come to this side and when they move there, they turn their backs to the blackboard so whatever you (the teacher) is doing, they just go along but you don’t get the results expected”.

There are at least 100 pupils in the school even though many of them frequently absent themselves from school.

The classroom floors are not cemented

In primary 1, there are about 25 pupils. A few of them sit on an old bench and the rest, on the bare ground. The classroom floors are not cemented.

Of the four classrooms at the Agandaa Primary School, only class 4 has its entire roof intact. It is also the only classroom with some desks.

There is no office for the headmaster of the school. He keeps some of his books on a table in a corner of class 2.

“I keep my important documents like the attendance registers in a nearby house so that they don’t get destroyed”, he said.

The School has only two teachers – the headmaster and one community volunteer.

To cater for the deficit, some of the brilliant pupils in class 4 sometimes guide their juniors in the lower classes through lessons.

Doris Ayanore

Doris Ayanore, 9, a class 4 pupil said, “We don’t have textbooks, we don’t have teachers and we don’t have a school block. We want the government to help us”.

The Agandaa Primary School was officially adopted by government in 2014 but is yet to get a proper school block.

The nearest schools to the community are too far away so the children cannot get there since they have to commute on foot.

Atanga though acknowledging that the Ghana Education Service has been helpful in providing some teaching and learning materials for school, laments that the deplorable nature of the school makes it extremely difficult to achieve good educational results there.

The headteacher is, therefore, appealing for help.