Students appeal to NAGRAT to return to the classroom

The Greater Accra Regional Students' Representative Council on Thursday appealed to the Government and the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) to speedily resolve the issues that have led to the five-week-old strike by NAGRAT members.

At a press conference in Accra to express the frustrations of students of second cycle schools for being neglected by their teachers since schools re-opened, Master William Boye, Regional SRC President, said students for some time now had been treated unfairly.

This is because strikes by members of NAGRAT had become an annual ritual, he said, adding that students had now become fed up with it and asked the Government to be sensitive to the plight of teachers.

He said Ghanaian students would be writing the same West Africa Senior Secondary Certificate Examination with colleagues from the West Africa Sub-Region from April 2007 irrespective of whether they had completed their syllabus or not.

"The examinations are not in anyway marking time with NAGRAT's strike action," he said, and urged both the Government and NAGRAT to consider the plight of the students when taking their stand in the impasse.

Mr Boye said it was obvious that students were being deprived of their right to education granted them by the Constitution and queried: "Is this to suggest that Government through the Ministry of Education and NAGRAT are interested in us having a mass failure?"

He said teachers were the backbone of second cycle schools and without them everything came to a halt with discipline breaking down. Mr Boye said the absence of the teachers created an avenue for some students to roam about in town while at the same time creating other avenues for others to engage in drug.

He, therefore, appealed to the Concerned Parents Association, Parliamentary Select Committee on Education, Council of State, Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice and all stakeholders to intervene to resolve the impasse to enable NAGRAT members to return to the classroom as early as possible.

GNA