By Umaru Fofana
Months after running roughshod over each other government and private school owners held a crunch meeting yesterday on the invitation of the National Education Board.
Some school proprietors were asked to refund parents some of the fees paid them.
It followed disagreements emanating largely from how the schools should operate after losing grounds due to the Ebola outbreak that led to their closure for several months.
The education ministry says the school proprietors are fleecing parents by charging “huge amounts as fees” without the corresponding facilities, and that they had insisted on running a three-term system even though the state had announced two terms only.
Addressing a cross section of the owners of the nearly 1,000 private schools in the country, Chairman of the National Education Board said a tour of some of schools had left them very disappointed.
Professor Sahr Thomas Gbamanja said fees these schools charged were in no way commensurate to services they were providing, emphasising: “better facilities are needed in private schools”.
He said some of the schools only had sticks crossed as classrooms yet charging exorbitant fees, calling them “no schools” and “an embarrassment”.
He also alleged that there was “a lot of cheating going on in some of the private schools”, adding that there was the felt need to standardise
things with a view to categorising these schools as it was being done in some other African countries.
Prof Gbamanja called fees charged by these schools as exorbitant, with some asking for Le 4.5 million per term. He insisted that the fees must be reduced and parents refunded.
President of the Association of Independent Schools, Dr Brian Conton said: “All the schools I see represented here today, I do not recognise that description as belonging to anyone of them”, nor does any of the schools he represents as president.
“These schools are well kept, they are schools where children are well tutored,” he went on.
On high school charges as said by the government, Dr Conton said “private schools are private enterprises. And schools have to cover their costs,” the biggest part of which he said was the salary of teachers.
Dr Conton also said that the city council charges them even for the toilets and playgrounds provided for the kids which he urged the government to intervene to stop.
One of the schools affected by the mandatory part refund of fees was the Modern High School which was asked to pay back 10% of fees for its elementary school and 25% for the secondary school.
The school proprietress, Helen Keilli said her school could not afford that. Even though she said she needed to refer to her school stakeholders before giving a detailed reaction, she told Politico that it was “almost impossible to comply because our budget was done with the current fees in mind which we have not increased since 2014”.
She said half of the revenue generated was going towards paying staff salaries and so could not afford to reduce that or reimburse parents.
Mrs Keilli also said that prices had shot up which she said was weighing the school down, adding they were also busy repaying a bank loan they took to improve the school standards.
She said their revenues collapsed because many of the kids did not return to the school after the Ebola outbreak, yet they were obliged to pay their teachers.
Another proprietor remarked anonymously thus: “If the government pays to public schools a fraction of this undue attention it is paying to private schools there would be no need for us because the poorly-run and badly-supervised public schools would improve”.
There are close to 1,000 private schools across the country - a number which keeps increasing as confidence in public schools keeps plummeting. Many attribute this largely to overcrowding in classrooms, quality and truancy of teachers and poor supervision.
(C) Politico 14/01/16
