Let’s be proactive on subventions and grants to schools
Once again, senior high schools (SHSs) in the northern part of the country have had to delay their reopening because they have not received their feeding grants from the government.
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This means that while their contemporaries study, students in the schools that have had to delay or postpone their reopening would just be loitering at home.
It also means that they may lose out on academic work, if their originally scheduled date of vacation is not adjusted to accommodate the time spent at home.
Delays of this nature have occurred on a number of occasions over the years, a situation which does not auger well for an effective time-table for our public schools.
What the Daily Graphic finds very worrying is the fact that we do not seem to be learning from our past mistakes as a country, hence the cyclical delays in the payment of grants and subventions to the schools.
Moreover, those responsible for ensuring the timeous release of critical financial support to our state institutions seem to be bereft of ideas to halt the annual ritual of delays in the release of funds.
We also find that our schools have become so dependent on government grants and subventions that failure to release them affects the schools’ calendar and academic work.
What this does is that it results in a psychological effect on the students who have to stay at home while their peers go to school to study. It also brings undue pressure to bear on the teachers who constantly have to devise ways to catch up with schools that re-open on schedule.
Final-year students also have to bear with the inconveniences that come with extra classes and they sometimes have to stay over in school when the rest of the school is on vacation. Uncertainty and disorganisation have also become the bane of the teaching staff that have to reschedule their plans to match the new school calendar.
The delay in releasing the feeding grant to the SHSs in the three northern regions for the third term has caused the rescheduling of reopening from April 21 to April 27, on condition that the grant is released by then.
This means that if the money is not released within the week, the school authorities would have no choice but postpone re-opening a second time. Some students have already been stranded as a result of the late announcement, while others have had to incur extra cost because they were asked to return home.
Meanwhile, we urge the Ministry of Finance to ensure that the feeding grant is released to the heads of schools this week, to enable the students to return to school on April 27, 2015.
We should put in measures to forestall any such occurrence in the future. The grants and subventions must be released weeks before schools reopen to enable the schools to prepare way ahead of the arrival of students.