• It cannot be business as usual when students are gravely harmed or denied medical attention and released at the last minute when it is too late
• Days when school principals run schools as their personal chattels with zero accountability in the case of grievous student harm or death due to negligence should come to an end.
Image: OZONE
The recent spike in deaths in schools across the country the latest being at the Sacred Heart Mukumu Girls High school brings once again the stubborn and unattended matter of school safety.
While it is clear that successive governments have taken a puritanical and moralistic view around school discipline matters, it is increasingly clear those in charge of school management are taking advantage of this view and instead of taking full responsibility, some are blaming and gas lighting students and in the latest case-the media.
Three prepositions can be advanced to explain this lack of accountability and demand that the Parliamentary Committee on Education compels the Ministry of Education to establish a robust school safety regime that is wholistic and student-centred ensuring that no student shall be harmed due to negligence and inaction.
First, while acknowledging that the 100 per cent transition agenda for has led to unenvisaged student population, there was a missed window in the review of school infrastructure, teachers and workers capacity to provide proper oversight to students.
Basic education has been the hardest hit with the roll out of the CBC curriculum that placed an urgent need for rapid school infrastructure development without taking into account the necessary health, disability friendly, safety and evacuation concerns in most of the new buildings.
Boards of Management and local politicians are more concerned about the procurement tenders completely neglecting the need for buildings that are fit for purpose. As a result, most of the new buildings are not safety ready and in the event of any emergency, they will simply be deathtraps for the hundreds of children.
This situation is a collective failure by the Ministry of Education in allocating more students to schools, neglecting the integrity, adequacy and capacity of the infrastructure. It is a failure by school communities – teachers and parents to ignore the evident safety risks students face and it becomes challenging to identify a child whose health is gradually deteriorating because of the population.
Secondly, while there is possibility that in certain incidences, students are individually responsible for incidences of school unrest that can result in deaths or harm of other students. The chilling trend is the complete unaccountability and distancing from responsibility by school management.
Synonymous to the blue of blue code of silence among police officers whenever there is misconduct, this tendency for teachers to cover up for one another, especially in the aftermath of grave student harm calls for an enhanced criminal liability clause to be introduced in teachers’ contracts by the Teachers Service Commission.
There is need for TSC to reconstitute its disciplinary machinery in a way that will swiftly address cases of teacher misconduct, including placing criminal liability on head teachers and school principals when children die or are gravely harmed in school.
If TSC cannot effect this, Parliament should review the TSC Act and establish an independent Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal that will deal with school management negligence.
The third opportunity to address school safety is the need to relook the Whole of School Approach being rolled out the Ministry of Education. A clear protocol for school safety should be put in place, outlining standard operating procedures for reporting deaths and negligence in schools, protecting whistle blowers and providing a clear process for school alumni associations, parents associations and school boards of management to work together.
It cannot be business as usual when students are gravely harmed or denied medical attention and released at the last minute when it is too late to reverse the harm already caused by delayed action.
While we acknowledge that the Kenya Kwanza government owes this country enactment of a National Disaster Management Authority that will create a single agency to coordinate all matters of civil disaster response and coordination, days when school principals run schools as their personal chattels with zero accountability in the case of grievous student harm or death due to negligence should come to an end.
The writer is a disaster risk reduction specialist. He can be reached via [email protected]