Some Form One students who reported to various schools in Nyeri county were yesterday sent home after their details did not appear in the National Education Management Information System.
Many parents arrived with their children with letters of admission but the names were not in Nemis.
“They are coming here and we do not know how to help them and so they are stranded. We are sending them back,” said Joseph Musau, the Principal of Karima Boys High School in Othaya.
The extra-county school is expecting to admit 240 boys.
Musau said the school had difficulties with the large number of students.
The school had four streams before introducing a fifth one last year co comply with the government’s effort to achieve 100 per cent transition from primary to secondary school.
“We are actually constructing some of the facilities with a lot of difficulty because funding from the government is not come as we expect,” Musau said.
The school was forced to use makeshift dormitories to accommodate the extra students.
At Giakanja Boys High School in Nyeri Town, deputy principal Nicholas Maina said the school is experiencing the same challenge as some students’ details were not in the Nemis yet they had admission letters.
Most of those whose names missed from the system had applied for admission elsewhere.
However, unlike in many other schools, the deputy headteacher said the admissions were genuine and the students were enrolled pending filing of their details in the Nemis.
The school has admitted 288 Form One learners.
Things were different at Nyeri High School where 350 students were admitted.
Principal JK Maina said most of those who reported were in the system.
However, he said the Nemis had its failings because it was a new system. Some new students reported with admission letters but their details were missing in the system.
“They were admitted here but asked for vacancies in other institutions and were put in the lists of the other schools. So they were not available in our school’s Nemis systems,” Maina said.
He said although the new students had paid school fees and had met all the requirements, they were not allowed in the school as there were orders from the ministry that only those in the system should be admitted.
Form One admissions began in national and extra-county schools on Monday.
A spot check by the Star showed admissions went smoothly in most schools with the exception of minor connectivity challenges.The online registration was supposed to take two minutes on average.
The ministry intends to admit all 1,052,364 candidates who sat KCPE last year.