Mukono Deputy Resident District Commissioner (RDC) Mike Ssegawa is worried by the small numbers of students who have turned up to different schools for the third term which commenced on Monday last week.
While visiting different schools last week, Ssegawa said he found almost empty classrooms yet the teachers were present and ready to teach.
“What has surprised me is the fact that even candidate classes, Primary Seven, Senior Four and Senior Six are also missing from their schools yet they are starting their Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) papers in less than a month now,” he said.
The deputy RDC while at St. Andrew’s Seed Senior Secondary School in Ndwaddemutwe village in Kimenyedde sub-county, Mukono district learnt that because the rainy season has just started, some parents are still holding their children for garden work.
One of the students when asked why her colleagues had not yet reported back, she said they pass by them going to gardens.
Nathan Kigongo, the headteacher of St. Andrew’s Seed School said that in Senior One which has three streams with over 300 students, by Tuesday they had only registered 50 students.
“For Senior Four, we have 151 students but only 67 have reported. In Senior Three, we have two streams with a total of 189 students but we only have over 25 students who are back,” Kigongo noted.
He added that the low turn-up affects the way they plan for the term, more so for the candidate classes who have their teachers already doing serious teaching preparing the candidates for the final UNEB exams.
“Such parents who do not want their children to report to school on time affect us so much. Imagine in a school like ours which is government aided whereby the parents are just supposed to buy scholastic materials and pay for the children’s lunch but still they fail to make it on time,” he wondered.
According to the UNEB time table, Senior Four candidates will start their exams on October 14, with a briefing session and start writing their exams on October 17, with a Mathematics paper in the morning.
The deputy RDC Ssegawa warned parents who are still keeping their children in gardens to stop and take them back to school or he will round them up with security and force them to take the children to school.
“Education is a right to children and blocking a child from going to school is illegal and punishable in law. More so in a school like this one where it’s the government responsible for school fees,” he said.
Kigongo told the RDC that the school which was officially launched in 2022 to handle a population of 350 students closed last term with 1200 students. He said that when all those students report back, they will be lacking resources like the classrooms, desks and teachers because the government is only paying for 17 teachers out of at least 35 teachers who would be handling the students.
At Bishop West Boarding Primary School, an inclusive school for Mukono diocese which also handles pupils with special needs, the headteacher Lydia Nakachwa said that they also registered very limited numbers.
Nakachwa said that it becomes worse on the side of the special needs children who can also spend a full month at home for their parents to first handle what they call the normal children; something she said is wrong and uncalled for.
“Out of the 68 pupils under the special needs category, at least 33 have reported back. And the rest of the school which closed last term with 350 pupils, only 160 have come back,” she said.
Nakachwa also reported that some parents stop at taking their special children to school and may be paying school dues but they do not visit them on visitation days and also go for them at the end of the term after days, something which torments them so much.
Rev. Edward Muyomba, the Vicar of Sts. Philip and Andrew’s Cathedral Mukono asked the parents to always treat their children with some disabilities the same way they treat their other children.
“We have seen many disabled people whose parents did not neglect when they are doing so well and others holding big positions in government. Please parents don’t deny the disabled children their right to education,” Muyomba urged.
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