School managers with chronic alcoholism and drug and substance abuse problems will be treated for three months at the Teachers Service Commission expense.
This was revealed by TSC chairman Jamleck Muturi on Wednesday at the 46th Kenya Secondary School Heads Association annual national conference in Mombasa.
Muturi said the TSC has established a fully equipped wellness centre with qualified medical staff to help rehabilitate principals and teachers who turn to alcoholism and drugs and substance abuse due to stress at work.
“Principals work under very challenging environments. We treat alcoholism and drug and substance abuse as a disease,” Muturi said.
“We will give paid leave for such teachers and book them in a rehabilitation centre for three months.”
This comes as principals grapple with challenging conditions that come with increased enrollment of students with no commensurate funding.
Kessha chair Indimuli Kahi said the funding schools get does not factor in new responsibilities like recruitment of Board of Management teachers for subcounty schools.
He noted that subcounty schools are mostly day schools which are not allowed to charge anything as fees.
“When capitation delays, these schools suffer because how do you feed the students and how do you employ the BOM teachers?” posed Kahi.
He said this leads to stress levels of the principals rapidly increasing, some of who end up abusing drugs and substances, with others being alcoholic.
Muturi said the commission got an increased budget of Sh323.7 billion in the 2023-24 fiscal year which is Sh24 billion more than the 2022-23 allocation.
Of this, some Sh4.6 billion will be used to recruit some 20,000 teacher interns to help address the teacher shortage situation.
“By next week, we will be advertising for these positions so that those who qualify can apply,” Muturi said.
He said the last time, the government provided funds for intern teacher recruitment.
Some Sh1 billion has also been set aside for the promotion of teachers, including principals who have stagnated for a long time.
"We want motivated principals,” the TSC chair said.
Another Sh1.3 billion will be used to capacity-build teachers for the CBC.
The commission has also trained some 163, 938 teachers on implementation of remote learning across the country.
This means a teacher who teaches at Machakos High School can be able to remotely teach students at Kanga High School using technology.
“This is meant to help deal with the teacher shortage situation that we have in the country,” Muturi said.
This is in addition to the efforts that the government is putting in place to employ more teachers.
In the 2022-23 fiscal year, the government employed 30,550 teachers for the Junior secondary schools.
There were 9,000 teachers who were employed on permanent and pensionable terms while 21,550 were intern teachers.
These were deployed per stream, meaning a school with one stream got one teacher while one with three streams got three teachers.
However, Muturi urged principals to be prudent and innovative in the utilisation of the little resources they have so as to be effective and efficient.
He encouraged them to come up with innovative income-generating activities so as to complement the funding from the government, which is never enough.
"A school can as a project rear chicken and be selling them or the eggs they produce,” Muturi said.
