The teacher who recorded students of Keveye Girls Secondary School being caned wanted to tarnish the School’s good name, Board of Management vice chairman Elias Onyango has said.
The video was in “bad taste”, he told the press on Monday at the school.
“The video was purportedly recorded by a teacher from this school. This is damaging not only to the school but the county at large,” Onyango said.
He distanced the school from the video footage showing students being caned.
The video showed four teachers – three men and a woman – mercilessly caning students in the staffroom.
“The board convened on instructions of the Education CS and exhaustively handled the contents of the video,” Onyango said.
The board said the video was “stale” as the people in it could not be identified, a sign the recording could have been done before the school rebranded.
The vice chairman said the clip was intended to taint the school’s good academic performance.
Keveye was the top girls’ school in Western Province in the 2014 KCSE exam.
“A school that performs may attract detractors. We are still on course to unravel the truth behind the video clip. The board will get to the bottom of this incident we believe is intended give us a bad name,” Onyango said.
He said they are yet to identify the teacher who recorded and circulated it.
“I wonder why whoever took the video did not hand it to the board for action or even the school’s administration or the county education board,” Onyango said.
“We normally have meetings with teachers. We are not working in isolation.”
School principal Judith Ngome said: “We pray the dust settles fast because the video clip has created tension at a time we are anxiously waiting for the release of the 2015 KCSE exam results.”
She said the confidence shown by her students when Education CS Fred Matiang’i visited last Thursday was a sign the students do not feel intimidated.
“If we were as brutal as the video clip portrayed, then our population would not have been doubled this year. Some of the girls would not have reported when schools reopened. We are not a hostile environment,” Ngome said.
