A recent investigation carried out by SALONE TIMES has indicated that many schools don’t have an adequate number of books and teaching materials for all the students they have enrolled.

“It’s difficult, very difficult. You can’t teach without books,” a teacher at a Government Assisted School tells us.

He goes on to say that many of the children in his class must share the books they have.

“Not all us of have textbooks so we read together in class. I am lucky because my grand-mother bought one for me,” a student in the same school tells us, “they should supply more books to us.”

Most of the books in many school libraries are provided for by various NGOs like, Plan International. There aren’t any Government teaching materials in the Government Assisted schools we investigated.

The teacher SALONE TIMES spoke to admits that when it comes to examinations, many of the students may have poor results because they don’t have access to books outside of school to study. He says he has heard from several people that books are either being stolen from the Ministry of Education, or people involved with the Ministry are selling them, therefore a smaller number of books are ending up in schools.

The Head of the English Department at St. Joseph’s Secondary School, Miss M. Smith-Turner, tells us the situation has been like this for decades now.

“You must not wait for the Government. It’s a matter of priority and it is negligence on the part of parents. Books should be a priority,” she says.

She goes on to say that a big problem is that the previous Minister of Education made buying textbooks optional for students. According to her, it’s impossible for children to learn without books.

“Government doesn’t supply us with any books at all,” she says.

The school has a book store, where they sell books to the children.

A bit further down the road is the Municipal School Dr. June Holst Roness This School received books from Government during the last academic year. They distribute them when they have classes and then gather them up at the end of the class.

“We have enough for a class at a time, but if we allow the books to go home with the children, most of them will go missing,” says Mr. Abu Bakarr Kamara, Vice-Principal of the School.

He says they do not receive reference books from the Government, and the school must buy those themselves. He admits results could be less on examinations because of the lack of teaching materials. He shows SALONE TIMES the books they receive, which are stamped with their school logo, and that of the Ministry’s to ensure if they are found being sold on the streets, they will be able to trace the books back.

In Waterloo District, the Western Area Rural District Council is currently in the process of distributing books to all the schools.

“We make sure all teachers sign, stamp, and date them so we can track them and not have the books end up being sold on the street,” says J.J. Blacki, Head of the Education Committee.

He admits that in the past thieves have broken into schools in the district and stolen books.

“The police also need to help us monitor the books being sold in the streets,” he says.

He also calls on members of the press to give information of any books they see on the streets to the authorities.

Education Officer for Freetown City Council Henry Fyfe, tells SALONE TIMES about the ongoing exercise of distributing teaching materials to the schools.

“All books must be stamped by FCC and the school itself,” he says.

He went on to say they are making announcements on the radio saying that books should be kept in the schools. They also communicate this practice to the councilors.

“If we see the books in the streets, we know where they came from,” Fyfe says.

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Author: Ibrahim Joenal Sessay
Photography: Ibrahim Joenal Sessay
Source: jhr
Original Publication Date: Nov. 20, 2009

The prolonged civil war in Liberia over the years has disrupted the process for a generation of youth, and caused a low net enrollment of students in Liberian school.

Since the launch of UNICEF, back to school programs some years back and the pronouncement of free and compulsory education by the UP government, there has been some level of improvement in the enrollment process.

The MDGs report 2008 has enshrined that the gross enrolment of primary education stands at 86.3 % for the year 2007 which is much encouraging as compare to 200 to 2002 school year raging to 56.2%. Nevertheless, the report also indicates that there has been considerable improvement in the enrolment process since the launch of free and compulsory education.

The free and compulsory education however has its own side effect which needs to be concentrated upon by the government: too many children in the classrooms. The over-crowdedness of public schools and even the University of Liberia  are all drowning in the sea of denseness.

“The over-crowdedness of public schools is an age-old phenomena and the inheritance of the Madame Sirleaf’s Government,” Mr. Abraham Nyounway, Secretary General of the Teachers’ Association of Monrovia consolidated School System and registrar of Newport Jr. High School revealed.

Despite the compactness of schools, many students are seen every day roaming the streets selling for their parents as bread winners, while some said that they are selling to complete the payment of their school fees before returning to school.

However, Mr. Nyounway blamed the denseness on the unavailability of structures to contain the number of students.

To date, students opting to attend private schools can be turned down by many public schools due to space problem. This causes some parents to have to choose to send their kids to private school – which is too exorbitant – or leave them alone without school. This is also contributing to the roaming of school aged children on the streets.

Some years ago, some 64 countries converged to Dakar, Senegal in an effort to improve learning standards in their respective countries. At the conference, a specific target was reached in a consensus that each country’s representative should encourage a free and compulsory education back home; that by 2015 every citizen in that country must at least complete primary school. This same target has been set by the MDG 2008 report, “ensuring that by 2015 children everywhere boys and girls alike, will be able  to  complete a full course of primary education.”

Even so, the 2008 MDGs report indicates that Liberia is far from achieving the goal of providing the level of school enrolment agreed on: this is not an encouraging sign. According to the report the level of enrolment to meet the target is actually deteriorating. “Based on current trends, the net primary enrolment ratio will be approximately 40% by 2015. Hence, it is likely that Liberia will achieve the MDGs of 100% net primary enrolment by 2015. Similarly, while the gross enrolment rate is impressive, it must be placed in the proper context,”  MDG’s report states.

The realities of these statistics are being felt by the people of Liberia.

“I hardly find food for my children to eat; sending them to school is a problem. I can’t even get money to give them for recess so it is better for them to be with me and help me sell to met our daily supply of food,” Rebecca Garley, Chicken Soup Factory.

Many parents and teachers agreed that school feeding would be necessary to encourage some poor parents to enroll their kids to school where they will not bother them enough for breakfast.

The executive Director of LETCOM, an educational advocacy organization that was organized following the end of the Dakar conference to make education a priority or a human right issue said the monitoring, evaluation and compulsory aspect of educational performance to promote and sustain the quality of educational system is very poor.

Photography by Myles Estey.

This essay, by Nicole Stradiotto from Barrie, Ontario was the winning submission from jhr’s Write the Wrong 2009 essay competition. Excellent work Nicole! Click here to go to jhr’s Write the Wrong 2009 page where you can find all of the finalists essays!

Prime Minister Steven Harper had the rapt attention of the nation last June as he issued an official apology for the abuse of the Residential School system. “The government now recognizes that the consequences of the Indian residential schools policy were profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on aboriginal culture…[positive experiences of the system] are far overshadowed by tragic accounts of the… neglect of helpless children, and their separation from powerless families and communities.”

Residential Schools

Flashbulbs lit up, cameras rolled and newsstands overflowed with coverage as mainstream news sources detailed the event. Yet, as Harper spoke, a new “policy” which will ultimately have a “lasting and damaging impact on aboriginal culture” was being endured by Canadian aboriginal children of the 21st century. This is the real headliner: once again, a generation of aboriginal youth is suffering badly at the hand of government institution and inaction. History is repeating itself, if journalists – our nation’s eyes and ears – would care to take notice. Many of the injustices of the Residential School system have been reincarnated in Canada’s First Nations Child and Family Services to the extent that our nation is in gross violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child2 (UN CRC) . The plight of aboriginal children in Canada’s foster care system is an issue that deserves far more attention from the nation’s media.

The UN CRC dictates that “states should always ensure that the principle of the best interests of the child is the paramount consideration in any alternative care placement of indigenous children”. Now, separating a child from their family is widely recognized as a measure of last resort amoung childcare professionals. Instead, “least disruptive measures” programs are favoured as in the child’s best interest. For all other foster care programs in Canada, all such methods of prevention and alternative arrangement must be exhausted before a child is removed from their home. Not so for aboriginal families. Cindy Blackstock, in her 2007 report to the Senate, explains, “Many of the First Nations agencies will tell you that it is not a problem to get $300 a day to put a child into foster care, but try to give $25 to a family so they can afford to feed the child and keep him or her safely in their home, and it is not possible under the current formula”. Where these programs exist, they are grossly underfunded. This methodology is in large reason why aboriginal children are overrepresented in the nation’s child protection services; while only comprising 3.8 percent of the Canadian population, they make up a staggering 30 percent of children in foster care.

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of this situation is that the vast majority of children are taken into care because of ‘neglect’. When one closely examines the definition of the term and its key drivers – poverty, inadequate housing and addiction — it is debatable whose ‘neglect’ that is: in the words of the National Children’s Alliance, “It is important to note that two of the three factors are largely outside of parental control”. The National Council of Welfare last year pointed out that the rates of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, as well as domestic violence, are no higher in aboriginal homes than in non-native homes. In effect, aboriginal children are being removed from their families and communities en mass because of the neglect of the government.

Even more disturbingly, this system amounts to assimilation. For the most part, aboriginal children are not being placed in homes of their culture; that is, three out of four are placed in non-aboriginal resources. In many cases, the cultural legacy of these youth is not even considered. According to Dexter Kinequon of Indian Child and Family Services, “Rarely does the continuity of the child’s culture influence the placement of the children in care”. This is in direct violation of the UN CRC, which states that when placing indigenous children in childcare, states must “pay due regard to the desirability of continuity in the child’s upbringing and to the child’s ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic background”.

Undeniably, a major underlying cause of the system’s ineffectiveness is a lack of funding. In a 2005 report, The First Nations Child and Family Caring Society exposed that the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development supplies 22 percent less funding per child to the aboriginal branch of foster care than the average province1516. The First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations have also recognized this injustice. In 2007, these groups filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission which alleged that the federal government’s “conscience under funding of child welfare amounted to racial discrimination within meaning of the Canadian human rights act”.

It is the role of the media to elucidate issues which require in-depth analysis and a broad perspective. The journalist also shoulders the responsibility of speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves. There is no issue in recent Canadian history that cries out for these services such as this one: the aboriginal foster care system is a twisted web of mismanagement whose sufferers have traditionally had no voice in our society.

In light of the aforementioned statistics and testimonies, it is easy to envision the coming of another apology much like Stephen Harper’s. Reporters will flock as the future Prime Minister announces that “the government now recognizes that the consequences of the [Canadian child welfare system] were profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on aboriginal culture”. On TV, radio and in print, our leader will lament the “…neglect of helpless children, and their separation from powerless families and communities”.

The Canadian media has a choice. It can immediately investigate and make public the injustice of the child protection system, provoking debate, activism, government action and perhaps even change. Alternatively, journalists can simply wait a generation or two, and cover this speech.