Magoha warns school heads not to send learners home for fees

Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha has directed school principals not to send home students who have fees arrears.

Capitation money, he promised, would be disbursed by the end of the week.

“Let me not hear that you have sent a child from a Kenyan school to go back to do nothing. That will not be acceptable,” said he.

However, Magoha urged parents who can afford to pay full school fees.

He made the remarks yesterday in Kisii County when he presided over the ground-breaking of the second phase of Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) classrooms in Kereri Girls High School.

On complaints by principals that the schools were strained over high price of basic commodities, the CS said the government was working on modalities to lower prices of maize.

“I’m very sure that within a month or so the government will have ensured the maize prices come down,” Magoha said.

The Kenya Secondary Schools Heads Association (KSSHA) chairman Indimuli Kahi decried the high cost of food saying prices had more than doubled in the past few weeks.

“We cannot reduce the amount of food that the children have been eating because that will be shooting ourselves in the foot,” Kahi said during a TV interview.

Learning resumes today for the second term, with schools expected to take a mid-term break by August 5 to pave way for the General Election.

The Ministry of Education  is rushing against time to deliver Junior Secondary School (JSS) classrooms, in preparation of the double intake in January next year.

According to Magoha, the Ministry will in two weeks start commissioning classrooms in the second phase.

He also said that about 1,000 classrooms under Secondary Quality Improvement Project (SEQUIP) will be constructed and another 5,000 will be organised in schools, which are in the same compound.

“We are working together with the private schools, more so in urban areas like Nairobi where we have registered tens of schools and by the end of the week, we could have registered about 100 of them, which have already converted their primary schools to junior high schools and that process is continuing,” Magoha said yesterday.

In a notice published in newspapers, Magoha insisted that the government had taken steps to ensure adequate infrastructure to absorb learners joining junior secondary.