Management, staff, and students of the Ahamansu Islamic Senior High School (AHISHS) are appealing to the government, Islamic and other religious institutions, NGOs, benefactors and all stakeholders to come to their aid.
LOCATION, ESTABLISHMENT, ACADEMIC AND CO-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES.
Located in Ahamansu, a farming community in the Kadjebi District of the Volta region, the people are mostly into cocoa and ginger farming among others.
AHISHS which is a major source of secondary education for students in and around surrounding villages in the district was established in September 2006 and was raised on the wheels of a private school until the government absorbed it in September 2012. Due to the free SHS policy, the school now admits pupils from all over the country leading to pressure on infrastructure.
Being the first and only Islamic Senior High School in the Volta region, the school offers courses such as General Arts, Agricultural Science, Businesses, Visual Arts and Home Economics. With a total student population of 301 now, AHISHS started the West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) in 2013 and over the years has made good grades and also has past students in most of the tertiary institutions in the country.
In sports, AHISHS does so well most especially in the areas of volleyball, high jump and football.
INFRASTRUCTURE FACILITIES.
As it stands, the school can boast of a two-unit Boys dormitory which currently houses four classrooms, V. Arts Lab and the school library but is very weak. The school also has a long block by the name “Gaddafi block” expected to be partitioned into four classrooms but has not, a wooden structure pavilion as the kitchen and dining hall, a small structure that houses the headmistress’s office; assistant headmaster’s office; the administration; ICT lab, bursal’s office; a temporal staff common room and a store.
More so, the school has a block that contains four single rooms with a porch each. It houses the senior housemaster, two other housemasters, and the house mistress, all a bit away from the dormitories. Finally, the school has only three medium-size rooms that harbor the girls’ dormitory for the three houses; Abubakar; Umar; and Uthman, leading to conjunction.
SUPPORTS.
The PTA has only provided a toilet facility for the staff. The only benefit from the government to the school is that the abandoned girls’ dormitory foundation began during the erstwhile Mahama administration but has never seen its constructors ever since the new NPP political administration took over. The school has since never received any substantive support from the government apart from the above-mentioned.
CHALLENGES.
The school is suffering from a lot of infrastructure facilities. Currently, the school has inadequate classrooms, dormitories for both boys and girls, lacks a dining and assembly hall, no permanent staff common room, no office for the senior housemaster, no office for the sports equipment, lacks a home economics lab, science lab etc.
As if that is not enough, there are no fence walls and so animals are mostly roaming about and destructing classes during contact hours. Most of the existing structures also need proper assessment and renovation to make them last a bit longer.
To add sore to injury, the school canteen was razed down by the violent wind and rainstorm on the 5th of May this year. Also due to the free SHS policy, the school had to borrow a temporal block to accommodate the first-year students of the 2017/2018 batch. The inadequate classroom is making teaching and learning a bit of a herculean task because students would have to break into segments to attend elective subject classes but can only sit in as a class during core subject periods.
Finally, a worrying situation is the inability to accommodate staff members due to a lack of staff bungalows, not even for the headmistress and her assistant. With regards, teachers have to seek their own accommodation at a cutthroat of rent price.
APPEAL.
Ahamansu Islamic Senior High School (AHISHS) just like any other senior high school in Ghana, educates not only students of the Islamic fraternity but pupils of all religions and cultures.
The school thus seeks urgent support before the start of the 2018/2019 academic year else it may relocate to ” under the trees” if nothing is done to absorb the 2018/2019 batch of students to be posted into the school.