President John Dramani Mahama has assured that majority of the 200 Day Senior High Schools project would be completed before the November general elections.
Although he admitted that his administration may not be able to complete all the 200 the NDC promised in the 2012 electioneering campaign, he was certain that 123 will be ready soon.
[contextly_sidebar id=”1jNOEKsdEpa8c5TRfg0IYWKnQ4iuJ5aV”]Speaking on TV3 on Monday, President Mahama said the schools will be put to judicious use after they are completed.
“There are ten ready, the Ministry of Education has to set the date [for the inauguration]. We are building 123 as at now at various stages of completion. Some of them the sites have been handed over, they’ve started the profiling, but the early ones that we started, many of them are in advanced stages of completion.”
“So although we promised 200, we have 123 ongoing, many of them will be ready before elections. We are not waiting to finish all before we populate the schools and so as we are finishing the schools and we are handing over to the Ministry of Education, we are putting the children to school,” he added.
In March 2014, President Mahama cut the sod for the construction of the first 50 schools, as part of a total of 200 new Community Day Senior High Schools to be built across the country.
The new schools were to be built as part of government’s commitment to improving access to secondary education and to help implement government’s progressive free senior high school policy.
Government has so far fully completed only four.
President Mahama at the time explained that: “existing secondary schools have a capacity to absorb only 60% of the students who qualify from Junior High School. Because of the high demand for secondary education, existing schools have been compelled to admit much higher than they were designed to accommodate.”
“This has led to circumstances in which there are some schools with as many as 3,000 students, twice the prescribed average of 1,500.”
–
By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana