Bawku (U/E) Feb. 8 GNA – The salaries of five teachers including a circuit supervisor have been embargoed in the Bawku Municipality as a result of bad attitudes, including frequent absenteeism, misuse of contact hours, lateness, drunkenness, and disrespect for authority.

The disciplinary action was taken as a result of the teacher’s irresponsibility towards work and to deter others from emulating such lifestyles in order to bring sanity into the service for the development of education in area.

Mr Benedict Yindol Badilebit, Bawku Municipal Director for Education, disclosed this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at Bawku to confirm measures being put in place to help raise the falling standards of education in the area.

Mr Badilebit said teachers were the major cause of the falling standards of education in the area adding that many teachers for the past six months had either not written lesson notes nor were they attending school to teach and this was the real cause of the poor performance in the area.

He said teachers in basic schools were known to often indulge in drunkenness, absenteeism, lateness and misuse of contact hours which were not encouraging the children to develop interest in their studies.

Mr Badilebit said these deviant behavior was brought to the notice of the directorate and this compelled it to institute a strict supervisory team to fish out and punish the offending teachers.

Mr Badilebit said as part of measures to instill discipline and raise the level of education in the area the directorate had embarked on an effective supervision to reinforce contact hours by teachers.

He said all schools in the municipality and its environs have been charged to set targets and try to achieve them.

Mr Badilebit told the GNA that the directorate had enforced the extra class’s concept by creating fourteen centers to prepare the 2,330 BECE candidates for the coming examination in April.

He commended Partnership for Accountable Governance in Education (PAGE), a Tamale based NGO for working to promote quality education in the three northern regions and for supporting the directorate with logistics.