KWAMANG SHS NEEDS URGENT HELP

New Campus of the Kwamang Presby SHS

The Kwamang Presby Senior High/Technical School in the Sekyere Central district of Ashanti needs an urgent external intervention to address some of its pressing basic needs to function very well.

 A visit by Ashanti Today to the school’s premises revealed that the school does not have an administrative block to administer affairs of the school for which reason the Headmistress, the Bursar and another staff are sharing one room which has been partitioned, while the Assistant Headmaster, the rest of the Accounts staff among other administrative officers are also working from an improvised classroom.

Anybody who visits the Kwamang Presby Senior High Technical school for the first time will unavoidably take it for a basic school. 

This is more so when it appears to be perching on the premises of the local Junior High School as its old site. 

The school is wallowing in a myriad of challenges that are seriously militating against the provision of the desired formal second cycle education to the youth.   

The boys in the Boarding House are being accommodated in an abandoned Chapel of the local Presbyterian Church with the girls being housed in a philanthropist’s private residence near the old site of the school in the township. Similarly, the boarding students have no choice than to use an abandoned classroom block of the Presby Junior High School which serves as the old campus of the school as the Dinning. 

The School which was started by the Kwamang Community about 20 years ago to provide second cycle education to not only the people of Kwamang and its nearby communities serves also residents of the Sekyere Central district’s portion of the Afram Plains and was adopted by the Presbyterian Church and later absorbed into the public schools system but this has still not been able to address the urgent needs of a senior high technical school. 

The only girls' dorm has also been abandoned

The new site of the school which is some distance away from the town has no fence around it while sharing the premises with a Fulani and his herd of cattle which the Headmistress, Madam Margaret Afranewaa Appiah says has been breeding tsetsefly, disease causing insects. 

The students have been compelled to use an uncompleted GETFund sponsored 12-unit classroom blocks whose construction began more than three years ago. 

To add salt to injury, the students have no decent place of convenience while a water closet which has been built from the school’s meager resources is yet to be opened for use by the staff.

The place of convenience for the students

 Importantly, a two-storey girls’ dormitory being jointly financed by the school and the Parent-Teacher Association, P.T.A. has serious structural defects for which reason work has been stopped just at the ground floor level. Academically, both the teachers and headmistress told Ashanti Today that the Home Economics, Visual Arts and Technical Skills Departments have absolutely no tools and workshops for the students’ practical works.

 It is rather the teachers who rely on their ingenuity, the school’s improvised kitchen and a private carpenter’s workshop for skills training. 

The outgoing Headmistress, Madam Afranewaa Appiah said the only staff residential accommodation is a three-bedroom quarters under construction at the new site to be used by the Headmistress while another quarters is being financed by a philanthropist in memory of his late mother. 

Madam Afranewaa Appiah therefore passionately appealed to all the interest groups of the school including the government, traditional authority of Kwamang and the old students to come to the aid of the school in its quest to produce quality and responsible future leaders for the society.