• Government is yet to address the major challenge of lack of power that contributed to the collapse of the tablet project.
•Heads say teachers who were trained during last project have exited.
Principals and headteachers have cast doubt in a plan to introduce computer labs as part of the digital project.
This is the second time the government is trying to introduce technology in Kenyan classes after the initial project to provide each learner with tablets in schools failed.
Sources from the Education ministry show that the government intends to kick off the one computer lab per school project in January next year.
Now, school heads are questioning how one lab a school will be implemented.
This project first sank without a trace within a year, and the laboratory projects suffer the same practical problems," Kenya Secondary School Heads Association chairman Indimuli Kahi says.
Kahi says the new laboratories are only effective for security as it would prevent vandalism that has been a challenge with the tablet project.
"There arose the problems relating to charging tablets during school hours and of course of students losing or selling them, or having them stolen," Kahi added.
Principals and headteachers now want the government to consider taking up the power bills before the rollout of the project.
"Utilities are a major setback for schools, most of those primary schools that were benefitted from rural electrification can no longer have power because the bills are too high for the principals to manage," Kahi told the Star on Sunday.
The electricity project was to cement the government’s Digital Learning Programme and began in 2013.
By 2016, the Rural Electrification Authority reported that about 24,000 primary schools were connected to the grid.
This was a 95 per cent success rate in ensuring all public schools were connected to power.
This was closely followed by the distribution of the tablets to support DLP in 2017.
Then came the training of teachers who were to implement digital skills.
Despite the four preparation before the rollout of the DLP, the project failed terribly only achieving a five per cent success rate in implementation.
High power bills were cited as the biggest obstacle.
In primary school, some headteachers have been slapped with power bills as high as Sh20,000.
In secondary schools, the situation is much worse as the bills hit a skyrocketing Sh800,000 every month.
This is occasioned by the need to light the institutions throughout the night for security reasons.
"These problems are still there and if we move to the laboratory project without addressing them then we will not have learnt from the previous mistakes and we are bound to fail, " primary school heads association secretary David Mavuta said on Sunday.
New tack; online training
Further, primary school heads through, their association, report that the majority of teachers trained for the project exited service as a result of retirement, resignation and death.
In training teachers for ICT, the government has changed tack to introduce a six-month-long online training.
In the training, teachers will take classes and sit examinations which they will be certified after excelling.
(Edited by R.Wamochie)