Help us with more classrooms - Community appeals for support

Correspondence from Bono Region

The Adantia community has made a passionate appeal to the public, to support the community initiative, in building up a three-unit classroom block.

Adantia community, which is mostly occupied by farmers, is about twenty kilometers away from Odumasi, the municipal capital of the Sunyani West Municipal Assembly, in the Bono Region of Ghana.

The school, Adantia Municipal Assembly Primary and Junior High School is the only public school that serves the school children at the entire community, with no classrooms for kindergarten pupils.

A visit by GhanaWeb to the school on Friday, March 5, 2021 saw how an old two-unit block with an office has been partitioned into five, as classrooms for school children from kindergarten to primary four.

In an interview with Mr Ernest Kwadwo Yeboah, the assembly member for Adantia Electoral Area, bemoaned the poor state of the old two-unit block, which has been partitioned to create spaces for kindergarten and lower primary pupils.

The Assembly Member revealed that the biggest challenge of the community was to get classrooms for kindergarten and lower primary pupils.

"As the assembly member and a teacher, my first priority is to get classrooms for these school children so that they can have sound teaching and learning", he stated.

"My first initiative to get this done was to organize a fundraising ceremony for this project''. He added that ''on November 28, 2020, I organized this fundraising and today, we have started a three-unit classroom block".

According to Nana Nsiah, an elder of the community, they had no option than to take the two old unit block, which is the workshop unit for the junior high school, and convert it into classrooms for these children.

"This structure is the workshop unit for the JHS pupils but because we lack classrooms, we partitioned it to create more spaces to accommodate our children", he said.

Some teachers who spoke to GhanaWeb expressed worry about how the children are overcrowded in the rooms at a time of a pandemic.

"Look at how they are closely seated?; we have no option than to manage them in this facility which put all of us at risk".

A class four teacher, said "teaching and learning is always interrupted because one classroom is divided into two for different classes". He asked, "how can class four children share the same classroom with class three pupils and expect them to have full learning hours"?

Mr Ernest Yeboah, on behalf of the community and the school, appealed to the public to come to their aide to support the community with building materials, such as roofing sheets, cements, blocks, sand and gravels to help them complete the stagnated three-unit classroom block which is solely funded by the community.