-Principal highlights appalling school conditions in rural Montserrado
By Christiana Mabande
Despite modest progress, compared to many sub-Saharan nations, access to education remains a significant barrier in Liberia.
The industry has many difficulties, including low learning outcomes, overage enrolment, inadequate infrastructure, bad learning environments, and unskilled and unprepared teachers.
The situation is more severe in rural areas, where only 59% of children finish primary school. This underscores the urgent need for prompt actions to improve educational opportunities and outcomes in these places.
“The children are not learning as they should. Philips said, “That is discouraging especially the environment, you cannot have a child coming and sitting on the floor two to three times they wouldn’t want to come again,” Bah Philips.
Philips oversees Buyowoh Public School in Montserrado County’s Todee District One as its principal. More than 300 pupils attend the ABC–6th-grade primary school, which was constructed in 2014 during the administration of former president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Enrollment, however, is down 60, or around 240, from the prior school year.
Liberia has the highest percentage of out-of-school children in the world, with 56% of primary school-age children not receiving an education, according to UNICEF. 15–25% of children aged 6–14 who are not in class, and 54% of kids who finish primary school. Many students choose not to attend the school because of its terrible status. Children are made to take their chairs from home to keep them from sitting on the unpaid floor.
“I haven’t gotten instructional material from the government or MOE since the EJS regime. Weah six years we didn’t receive supplies till now,” Bah Philips.”
It’s not just Boyouwoh Public School that has this problem. Another Margibi County elementary school with such restrictions is Lloydsville Public School.
The college is the only educational facility in the Lloydsville township. It provides services to more than 3,000 kids. Because of inexperienced teachers, fewer teachers per class, and a malfunctioning monitoring system that sometimes compels teachers to leave schools for days or even weeks at a time, it is claimed that students are only learning less than half of the curriculum each semester.
The school, the only educational facility in the area of Margibi, is a mat construction that houses only two teachers: the principal, who serves two roles, and another teacher. It is for students in the Nusury–sixth grade.
Jebbeh Smith, a fifteen-year-old pupil in the fifth grade at the school, bemoans the unfavorable atmosphere in which they are immersed. In addition to mentioning the paucity of furniture, she added that during class, when the few chairs they do have are occupied, they sit on bricks.
She went on to say that they all took up residence in the one classroom that was unaffected by the strong windstorm that destroyed the roof of their dilapidated school building.
Our pals aren’t drawn to the school because of the unpleasant learning atmosphere, so they’re thinking about the farms.
“We have Nursery to third grade on one side while grades 4-6 on the other side which are divided by the chalkboard” Jebbeh narrates.
A wide range of complicated issues, including geographic disparities, poverty, poor child health, high rates of gender-based violence, limited national resources, and a shortage of highly qualified instructors, confront Liberia’s education system.
A parent named Dorothy Sukpah is pleading with Margibi, the County’s Leadership, to renovate the public school in Lloyd Villie.
Given that many of the youngsters are adolescent parents, she said that the building’s state is frightening away their kids and that this has turned into a serious issue for the township’s parents.
“As I speak, we are cutting sticks to be used for the roofing of the building but no zinc and we don’t have money to buy zinc,” Sukpah.
The people of Lloydsville Township are uniting in their plea for the county’s Legislative Caucus and other pertinent authorities to act quickly to save their children’s future.
