By Mabinty M. Kamara
Mohamed Macmillan Fornah, Head Teacher for the Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a government -assisted Catholic primary school has expressed concerns over the current status of one of the school buildings that is housing over 400 pupils during school hours.
The school located in the vicinity of the Grafton Police barracks according to its Head teacher, was built in the 80’s by the Catholic Mission. He said as the population grew over the years, the need for an expansion on the existing structures arose during which the Cotton Tree Foundation, a non-governmental organization, came in and sponsored the construction of an additional structure between 2008 and 2009, that has sadly as a result of poor work, become a death trap waiting to strike.
The structure houses classes 3, 4 and 5 whilst the older structure accommodates the remaining classes including pre-school. The school has a total of 984 pupils.
Mr. Fornah added that the teachers have collectively voiced fears of their safety and those of the children in having classes in that building. He said he had to invite the Community Teachers Association and the School Management Committee chairman to encourage the teachers to be a little bit patient.
He said he has also invited the Inspector of Schools who went and saw the terrible state of the building but has yet to get feedback from him on the issue. The School head also disclosed that the Catholic Mission was also aware of the situation but faced funding constraints.
“Looking at the current status of that building, if we continue allowing kids into those classes, one day we are going to have a devastating effect on the lives of those kids. So we want people to come and support us in that regard because we have a vast land that can take more structures,” he said.
Fornah added that if the situation continues as it is, by next academic year, they will be left with no option but to massively reduce the school’s number of pupils and new intakes so that the existing better structures can accommodate them according to their room capacity.
“In fact my plans for this year are to ask less performing kids out so that they give space to those that are doing well so that we stop using that building. That’s the only means to discourage the coming in of more children because we cannot be risking it. If anything goes wrong, I will be held responsible as they will say I was fully aware of the situation and still allowed kids in it. But all my calls on non-governmental organizations and businesses around the communities have fallen on deaf ears,”
Even the main building that houses pre-school and the remaining classes does not seem large enough when Politico visited the classes, as the pupils were crammed together with hardly any consideration for social distancing, though the class 6 pupils were mostly masked-up at the time of visit.
The Catholic School Secretary, Michael Selenga Bassie told Politico that the mission was well aware of the situation and is working on resource mobilization to address the situation.
He said the structure was built by the Cotton Tree Foundation but that they did not involve the mission in the process so in the end, a bad job was done.
He added that closing the school now will be disadvantageous to the hundreds of pupils in the Grafton Community, noting that the facility was initially built to aid learning of the children of police officers in the Barracks but as time went by, the community grew and so did the school.
The best score for the school in the last National Primary School Examination was 321 with 265 as the least grade scored by the 104 pupils that took the examination at Mount Carmel.
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