Schools take tough measures after riots

• New rules expected to reduce indiscipline in places affected by recent wave of strikes.
• Many parents have protested at the directive requiring them to pay for repairs.
• Parents, teachers and other players in education, have been meeting to find the solutions to strikes in schools.

Tough conditions have been imposed on students seeking re-admission in schools affected by the recent wave of strikes.

Parents will have to pay between Sh2,000 and Sh6,500 per student to cover for the damage caused when students burnt dormitories and destroyed other school property during the protests that rocked more than 300 schools countrywide.

Some 700 students of Mwasere Girls Secondary School in Taita District will each pay Sh6,500 for the reconstruction of a dormitory burnt during the protests. In some institutions, students in boarding schools will be made day scholars.

In other schools they will have to sign declarations that they will not take prohibited items to school. Personal interviews will be conducted to establish who led the arson attacks in which schools lost millions of shillings in properties.

Transfers frozen

The Ministry of Education has already declared that students who led the arson attacks would not be re-admitted. It has also stopped the transfer of students for one year.

Among the other conditions that students and their parents must fulfil before readmission include:

• Paying damage fees for schools where buildings and property were destroyed.
• Form Four candidates involved in violent protests against mock examinations be suspended until the KCSE exam.
• Students sit mock exams as they commute from home.
• Clearance after police investigations into the cause of the mayhem.
• Expulsion of those involved in the attacks.
• Students to identify those who might have committed arson.

While some of the students face prosecution, parents will also bear the burden for the extensive damage to school buildings and property.

However, many parents have protested at the directive requiring them to pay for repairs.

On Wednesday, parents at Dagoretti High School said the amount needed for repairing classrooms and doors had been increased to Sh3,500 from the Sh2,000 agreed on during an earlier meeting between them and the school administration. The school is set to re-open later in the week.

Prompt parents

The decision that parents will bear the full cost of rebuilding schools burnt down during strikes was first made by President Kibaki during a meeting in Nyeri at the weekend.

Later, the senior deputy Director of Education in charge of secondary education, Ms Concilia Ondiek, said money from the Constituency Development Fund and other devolved funds would not be used to rebuild the destroyed facilities.

This, she said, would prompt parents to take charge of their children’s discipline.

The Kenya Secondary Schools Heads Association chairman, Mr Cleophas Tirop, has since supported the directive saying parents should shoulder the cost of repairing burnt schools.

Mr Tirop, who is the Kapsabet Boys High School principal, said that as a rule, parents meet the cost of damage caused by students. “We cannot pass the cost to the Government while the students caused the problem,” he said.

Most headteachers the Nation spoke to supported the directive, saying it served parents right because they had abdicated the role of disciplining their children.