As the three teachers’ unions continue to strike, the Tema District Office of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) has recommended parents to keep their children at home.
The selection of Dr. Eric Nkansah as the Director-General of Education prompted the teacher unions GNAT, Coalition of Concerned Teachers, and National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) to call a national strike.
The walkout is in support of their demands that the government reverse the appointment of Mr. Nkansah, who the unions claim is a banker and is unqualified to hold such a post due to his lack of teaching experience.
In order to protect their safety, parents should keep their children at home during the teachers’ strike, according to Mr. Abednego Tettey Nuertey, Chairman of GNAT, Tema District, who spoke to the Ghana News Agency in Tema.
He claimed that at the moment, the students were solely under the care of the head teachers, which he deemed to be a highly unsafe scenario.
The teachers were either absent or present but not instructing the students when the Ghana News Agency visited certain public schools in the Tema Metropolis. This left the kids to fend for themselves.
Regina Lomikie Teye, a sixth-grade student at the T.I. Ahmadiyya Basic School student, who together with her companions were seen leaving for home at around 1100 hours, claimed that even though some of their teachers had arrived at the school early, they had gone without instructing the students.
We spent the time playing because we weren’t being taught when we were at school, so we chose to leave and return the next day rather than continue to be there.
At the Padmore Street Basic School, things were a little different because some teachers were there while the students were eating their “School Feeding” meals.
All the classroom doors at Oninku Drive Primary School and Mante Din Basic School were shut; the students were playing football and conversing outside of their classrooms. Food vendors were sitting idle because there were no students to buy their goods.
Even though the Mante Din School normally closes at 1500 hours on a given day, according to Form 2 students Priscilla and Vitoria, the head teacher, the only person who showed up for work, did so at 1200 hours because the teachers were not there.
The students expressed their desire for their teachers to return to the classroom on Wednesday so that classes could resume.