EDUCATION

BEREKUM: Girl-child education given priority
The Berekum Municipality has recently been witnessing appreciable rise in the education of the female child; giving rise to creditable performance by the girls of school going ages at the basic level.

Date Created : 4/3/2018 7:27:05 AM : Story Author : Pius Agyemang/Ghanadistricts.com

The most recent performance by a graduate of Bishop Owusu Girls Junior High School Complex, Yaa Asantewaa, who excelled so creditably in the 2017 Basic Education Certificate Examination (B.E.C.E.) qualifying her to represent the Brong Ahafo Region at the 2018 Presidential Award package, is an ample testimony to that effect.

Kingsley Aborakwa, Berekum Municipal Director of Education, re-echoed the aforementioned scenario in the 2018 Independence Celebration of Ghana at an auspicious durbar at the Golden City Park in Berekum, pledging his directorate’s stringent efforts to uphold and give the female-child’s education extreme facelift.

It is against this backdrop, coupled with certain pertinent factors that the Girl [Female] Child Education Directorate of the Berekum East Municipal Education office earmarked three days for a sensitization programme amongst female school children in all the eighty public schools within the Municipality.

Some three thousand (3,000) pupils and students, mainly girls, from Primary 4 to JHS 3 in the 80 public schools within some 32 settler communities in the Municipality partook in the programme that was categorized into three sections namely, Clean- up Exercise and Health Screening; Street Carnival and games; Grand Durbar and Model Award of Excellence.

The Municipal Education Director who addressed the august function Wednesday, advised the girls to take their studies seriously, uphold the principles of decency and good manners, remain chaste and desist from deviant behaviours such as disobedience, promiscuity, bad company and gross indecent exposure.

Speaking on the theme for the occasion, “Improving upon Girl Child Education – The Role of the 21st Century Woman,” Augusta Amponsah, the Girl Child Coordinator for Basic Schools in the Municipality, under whose auspices the programme was organized, urged the female students to pursue virtue and shun social vices and immorality as a whole.

Abstinence, she noted, was the best option among all the sexual choices at that stage of their lives, as she stresses further; “You are obliged to abstain from sex and its related activities, and practice chastity – nothing else.”

She made a passionate appeal to her colleague teachers to lead exemplary lives worthy of role models, in terms of character formation, decent dressing, and general attitude in inculcating in their protégées good moral practices and academic excellence.

In an interview with ghanadistricts.com, Hayfron Dadzie, Assistant Director in charge of Finance and Administration at the Municipal Directorate of Education, equally, warned male teachers to comport themselves, not to trespass and verbally or sexually assault the female adolescent students, by taking advantage of their weaknesses, sheer ignorance and enthusiastic naivety.

He advised teachers who indulged in such nefarious activities to refrain from them before the Ghana Education Service Law (GES) law is used to sanction them and face the full rigours of the law.