Regional News of Thursday, 15 April 2004

Source: GNA

Document school lands properly -Educationist

Fumso (Ash), April 14, GNA - An educationist has called on district assemblies, school authorities and the various communities to take measures to protect school lands from encroachment.

Mrs. Janet Adutwumwaa-Boakye, Girl Child Education Officer for Adansi East, who made the call, said this could be done by properly documenting and demarcating all lands that are released for school projects.

Speaking at the Open-Day of the Fumso Catholic Primary School, she said this would forestall encroachments on school lands, which had become a source of concern to school authorities of late.

Mrs Adutwumwaa-Boakye noted that most of the basic school lands were given out by traditional rulers without proper documentation and demarcation, and as a result of the demand for land for the construction of houses, people were encroaching on these school lands with impunity. This situation, she said, therefore needed to be stopped to enable the school have land for expansion.

Nana Kwaku Amoah, the Presiding Member of the Adansi East district assembly, commended the school for holding the Open-Day and entreated schools in the district to organise social activities to enable parents to evaluate the performance of both teachers and pupils. He asked parents to provide their wards with their needs so as to prevent the girls in particular from being lured with money by some unscrupulous men to have sex with them, which result could be catastrophic.

Mr K.A. Larbi, the headteacher implored the assembly to build additional classrooms for the school.

He said the population has risen to about 530 pupils but were using only six classrooms and pointed out that this situation had forced the school to adopt the shift system, which was causing a lot of problems for them.

Mr Larbi commended the School Management Committee (SMC) and the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) for their immense contributions to the school but appealed to them to provide the school with a urinal and a bus to pick the pupils to school since the school was situated a bit far away from the town.