Deaf students grappling with poor facilities

Students of the Mampong Senior High Technical School for the Deaf are reeling under poor and inadequate facilities for teaching and learning.

The school, established in 1975 to provide vocational, technical and secondary education for the hearing impaired, is ill-equipped to efficiently equipped the students with the requisite skill needed to survive.

TV3's Peter Quao Adattor who visited the school reports that home economics students take their classes in a classroom which doubles as dining hall, with improvised teaching materials.

The school not only lack classrooms, dormitories and teachers bungalows but also chairs. "A carpentry department, which could assist in providing furniture also lacks tools and materials to work with," Peter reported.

Students offering carpentry rely on obsolete tools, while the fashion and design students have to bring their own sewing machines for lessons. The school has only one sewing machine serving a class of about 17 students.

The situation is worst at the home economics department. The department has no single desk for its students who have had to improvise by plastic chairs without tables while others stand to take notes. Pastry tables are used by students as writing tables.

Their make-shift classroom also serves as a storeroom. Some of the ovens being used by the department are owned by teachers

"We need materials for the carpentry shop, metal work and the home economics department," Joseph Sam, headmaster of the school told TV3. He said some of the students at the Clothing and Textile department have to carry their own sewing machines to school due to the situation, noting that "if we have enough of these sewing machines on campus there wouldn't be the need for students carrying their own machines to school".

"For them to be functional in the society, they have to acquire certain skills that they can do well with their hands