Human beings desire happy memories that will last a lifetime. Many of these have to do with the experiences in primary school.
More often than not, a child’s character
and views begin to be shaped at the primary school level. This is why
the ambience of the school a child attends is as important as the
knowledge being impacted within the walls of the school.
However, some people will rather not remember the experiences of their primary school days.
Few days before the Children’s Day –
the only day particularly set aside to honour children and lay emphasis
on their education – Saturday PUNCH set out to seek the
experiences of pupils in some schools in some rural areas. Of course,
school children in rural areas usually have experiences that are
different from their urban counterparts.
The journey took our correspondent to Ifo Local Government Area of Ogun State.
At Olayemi Village, located few
kilometres from Lisa, the site of the 2005 Bellview plane crash, St.
Saviour’s Anglican Primary School stands in the middle of a forest.
St. Saviour’s is a two-block primary
school. The two blocks have three classrooms that can best be described
as sheds, and a decrepit headmaster’s office.
The teachers’ offices are in each of the classrooms – a corner with a table and chair.
A commercial motorcycle, who took our
correspondent through the thick forest that led to the school, had to
stop about 50 meters to the school.
The reason was obvious, getting to the
school had to be done on foot because every space surrounding blocks of
classrooms was overgrown with a forest of grasses as high as four feet.
Crossing from where the motorcycle stopped to the front of the blocks required a lot of will power.
Something becomes immediately obvious to any visitor to St. Saviours – the scanty number of students and teachers.
But a teacher soon enlightened our correspondent on the reason for this.
“Do you think any teacher would want to
come here? Even many parents around here avoid this school and prefer to
take their children to schools in the nearest big town,” he said.
Those who do not have the wherewithal to
take their children to schools far from the area are the ones who bring
their children to St. Saviour’s.
The teachers at the school would not speak on record and the headmistress had left for the Ministry of Education in Abeokuta.
In Ogun, teachers are not authorised to
speak on record to the press without an authorisation from the State
Universal Basic Education Board.
The classrooms at St. Saviour’s are merely rudimentary. They look at least 40 years old.
The walls of the building housing Basic
Kne and kindergaten pupils has a gaping crack on it, revealing the mud
bricks under the coat of age-old cement.
The roof is a tattered mess of rusty
roofing sheets that has numerous holes through which sunlight stream on
to the heads of the young pupils.
“What happens to these pupils if it suddenly starts raining?” our correspondent asked one of the teachers.
“Anytime it starts to rain, we quickly rush them into the other two classes with better roofs,” the teacher answered.
The answer further explains how the
school is able to manage with just three classes even though there are
Kindergarten pupils and those from Basic One to Six in the school.
Our correspondent soon learnt that the
first classroom – the worst – is for Kindergarten and Basic One pupils,
the second for Basic Two and Three pupils and the third for Basic Four
to Six.
To test how this works, our correspondent entered the classroom housing Basic Four to Six.
The pupils immediately all stood up to
perform their memorised greeting, “Good morn……ing sir. You are welcome
to our midst. God bless you.”
There are three rows in the classroom.
“What class are you?” our correspondent asked a pupil on the first row.
“I am in Primary Six,” he answered. When another pupil was asked on the second row, he answered, “Primary Five.”
On the third row, a pupil answered, “I am in Primary Four. Each row is for each class.”
There is the same set up in the Basic Two and Three classroom.
But that of the Kindergaten and Basic One pupils is another matter entirely.
The pupils sat haphazardly, each
perching where he or she could get a space.
Those who could not find a space on benches with their little friends, took up vantage positions on the bare floor as they sang, “A for Apple, B for Ball…”
Those who could not find a space on benches with their little friends, took up vantage positions on the bare floor as they sang, “A for Apple, B for Ball…”
Then our correspondent learnt about a
scary issue -snakes big and small, sometimes drop from the leaking roof,
which has no ceiling.
Our correspondent asked a pupil in one of the higher classes about the snakes.
The boy said in Yoruba, “We kill many
snakes here all the time. Snakes are normal here. We see them regularly
in our classrooms.”
He pointed to some of the gaping holes
in the asbestos ceiling of his classroom. “They sometimes drop from
those places,” he said.
Because of the ceiling in their
classroom, theirs is a better
place than that of the Kindergaten and Basic One pupils whose skulls are not protected from the heat coming down directly from the roof.
place than that of the Kindergaten and Basic One pupils whose skulls are not protected from the heat coming down directly from the roof.
Our correspondent stepped outside the
classroom for a moment and observed that truly, the classrooms were
tempting abodes for the snakes, which may need a warm place.
The thick and high bush surrounding the
classrooms are barely three feet away, an easy reach for any snake that
needs a warm bed.
Saturday PUNCH learnt that the
head teacher’s office was particularly a tempting abode for some of the
snakes, making the poor woman to abandon the office altogether.
“She has stopped staying in the office
because of snakes. She sits in the classrooms when she needs to work.
Even if the headmistress has a document she needs to take in the office,
she is always careful to check the door posts and corners of the office
first before she enters, in case snakes are hiding there,” our
correspondent was told.
“Bring your cutlasses tomorrow. We need
to do some work on this bush,” one of the teachers announced to the
pupils of the higher classes.
It did not seem to our correspondent
that the pupils would have the power to make any difference if they were
to start clearing the nearest bushes.
“We cannot just sit around. We still
need to do something. Of course, these pupils cannot do much on this
bush, but they will try what they can,” he said.
St. Saviour’s has a plain football field
in the front of the classes, with two goal posts. But no child dares to
play on the field.
The bell rang at 11am. It was break time.
All the pupils trooped out of the classrooms.
“Where are they going?” our correspondent asked a teacher.
“They are going home, of course. There
is nowhere to play here and no food vendor comes here. So, what will
they be doing around here at break time? They will come back to school
after break time,” he said.
As our correspondent watched the students jump into the grassy field on their way home, they cut an eerie sight.
Our correspondent was able to see indeed
how dangerous the overgrown field was as the pupils moved through it.
Most of them could barely be seen above the tall grasses.
“Not to worry, they are used to it. Most of them grew up on farms,” a teacher said.
Saturday PUNCH could not confirm
how old St. Saviour’s Anglican Primary School was. But it is doubtful if
any further work has been done to develop the school since it was
created.
Few kilometers to St. Saviour’s is
another rural school, St. Paul’s Primary School, Oluke, which has also
suffered years of neglect.
Both schools surprisingly have a lot of
things in common. Like its counterpart at Olayemi, St. Paul’s has two
blocks of classroom as well but not as old as that of St. Saviour’s.
The worst classroom is also dedicated to the Basic One students in this school.
The block housing the young pupils is an eyesore that speaks of years upon years of neglect.
Half of the roof of the building had
become so rusted and eaten away, that it was obvious that if nothing was
done soon, a strong wind may rip off the remnant of the tattered
roofing sheets altogether.
Reading words on their blackboard with enthusiasm, the young pupils had no idea of the danger looming over them.
Our correspondent noticed a piece of old asbestos hanging precariously over the young pupils as they sat in the class.
Most of them sat on small plastic chairs
they brought from home because the school’s wooden benches that were
still in good condition would not contain all of them.
When our correspondent visited St.
Paul’s, the teachers said there had been a “circular from SUBEB” that
directed them to ensure no “strange visitor or journalist” was allowed
to make any findings in the school.
It was obvious the pupils in St. Paul’s
are not likely to suffer the menace of reptiles as much as the St.
Saviour’s pupils. The vicinity of the school was not so overgrown with
high and thick bushes.
It is doubtful that those who included
universal education as one of the millennium development goals, thought
about it in terms of the kind of education the pupils in schools like
St. Paul’s and Saviour’s are receiving.
One thing is sure, though. These pupils will never look back at their primary school years with relish when they grow older.
They will wish something had been done to help improve the environment in which they studied.
Commissioner for Education in the state,
Mr. Segun Odubela, said it was not surprising that the schools were in
such deplorable conditions.
Odubela said, “These schools have suffered many years of neglect. But I can assure you that work will get to them.
“Our plan is to reconstruct and renovate
about 1,490 primary schools throughout the state. Currently, we have
touched more than 400 of them, which you can independently verify. Work
will get to the schools in those villages soon. They only have to
exercise a little patience.”
PUNCH
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Having grown up grass in and around the school is no excuse at all. The teachers and parents can devote one hour every Saturday to tackle that. Do you need the government to come do the clearing of the grass for crying out loud! The issue of grass and thus Snakes should not have come up at all. The school head, teachers and parents should be blamed for not addressing that. On the dilapidated structures, I'm very sure the government is already ashamed of itself!
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