The Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Prof. Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, has said it will be a disaster for the government to send senior high school students back home over COVID-19 fears. Speaking at a press conference in Accra on Ghana’s COVID-19 case management on Tuesday, 14 July 2020, Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said closing down schools will be a bad idea.

His comment comes on the back of calls from the National Council of Parent-Teacher Associations (NCPTAs) to the government to send home all senior high school (SHS) students to prevent further spread of the deadly COVID-19.

The appeal of the NCPTAs is as a result of reports that some students and teachers of some SHSs in the country, have tested positive for COVID-19.

Fourteen SHSs have, so far, recorded COVID-19 cases.

Answering a question on the danger of keeping students in school, the GES boss said: “We believe that the best option is to keep them [students] in school because if we decide to let them go into the bigger society, then we rather have to close down the entire country because if you have a thousand students going into different homes and they are infected, we are not sure of what is going to happen to the larger community."

"We are talking about 550,000 students; that is, the Gold Track students plus SHS final-year students, so if we decide to let them all go, I think we will be causing a big disaster to ourselves," he added.