The Director General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Prof Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa has condemned the action of students of the Tweneboa Kodua Senior High School at Kumawu in the Ashanti region for vandalizing school properties.
Students of the school on Monday August 3, 2020 went on rampage destroying school properties after sitting for the first Paper of Integrated Science in the on-going West African Senior School Certificate examination (WASSCE).
The violent protest was against the headmaster of the school who they accused of being “too strict” during the supervision of the first paper. The students threatened to boycott the examination if the headmaster did not leave the examination hall. They alleged that the headmaster, Francis Awuah had slapped a teacher and also abused other students who were sitting for the examination.
One of the students is heard in a tape saying “we will not eat any food” and instructing their colleagues to destroy the school’s properties.
Reacting to the incident on Joy FM’s Midday News, Prof. Amankwa condemned the actions of the students and urged them to channel all their grievances to the appropriate authorities.
“I don’t think the students have that right. We don’t solve our problems through violence. So if they have any grievance, they have to channel it through the right processes rather than to vandalize government property unduly,” he stated.
Meaning while, the District Chief Executive (DCE) of the area, Samuel Addai Agyekum has set up a committee to investigate and address the grievances of the students. This was after the students presented their grievances to him. The students who had refused to sit for the second paper rescinded their decision and sat for the paper following the DCE’s intervention.
Addressing a related issue, Prof. Opoku-Amankwa dispelled claims by some students in videos making rounds that they were told to solve past questions that had been given to them because the examination questions were going to be set from those questions. He explained that the questions were only given to them to help in their general preparations towards the examination.
“Past questions doesn’t mean that you have to have in detail exactly what is in the past questions. It prepares you, gives you an idea of the things that are likely to come, the pattern of certain questions, how to answer them and the past questions that we gave them was actually something that we worked with WAEC such that it included the Chief Examiner’s report that gives comments on how students answer questions; the ones that they answered well, the ones that they did not answer well and then things to lookout for when you are answering your questions,” he explained.
