Managers and teachers at Aileru Primary School, a public basic school in Warri, Delta state, have raised the alarm over the invasion of the institution by urchins, influencing the behaviours of the pupils.
Raising the alarm when The Nation visited the depreciated school on Thursday, the Head Teacher of the institution, Mrs. Patience Mene, said she and the teachers carry out their daily duties in panic because of the environment the school is now surrounding by.
Mrs. Mene, who said she had worked in the school in the 90s as a teacher, said the once bubbling institution with hundreds of pupils back then is now reduced to a school with less than 165 pupils, with blocks of classes under locks for lack of patronage.
According to her, the school’s facilities have come effectively under the control of hoodlums, who take it over, hanging around it even during school hours, moving around, smoking Indian Head and taking other illicit substances to the full glare of both teachers and students.
She explained further that most of the classrooms, especially those still in use, have been vandalised by these illegal occupants as most of the fittings like ceiling boards, fans and other had been stolen, leaving most of them bare and ugly-looking.
She, however, noted that the pupils, in their innocence, sometimes copy some of the habits they see with the hoodlums, like practising how to smoke, adding “sometimes we will just be in the class and some wrapped substances will just be falling on our heads, sometimes faeces will be falling from the ceilings.
“We are not safe in this school. When we come in the morning, we see them (hoodlums) around smoking Indian Hemp. It is not a very good thing because the children of ours copy from them. When they are even in the class, they imitate how the hoodlums smoke.
“We try to tell them that they should not copy from them that it can make them go mad. It is not a good thing so they should stop it. They should always emulate good things”, she said.
She explained that the problem of the school facility started from lack of a protective wall around it, which both made it to be accessible to the criminal elements, as well as make the entire place open to flooding.
“There is no gate. The school is not fenced. We also have problem of signboard. There is no signboard. We need signboard to be fixed at strategic positions so that people will know that there is a school here. People don’t know that there is a school here because it is a hidden place”, she explained.
Mene, who explained that the school which used to host close to 1000 pupils during her time as a teacher there in the 1990s, now has about 160 total population of pupils, adding that the population had been depleted especially because of the effect of flooding on it.
She, however, appealed to the Delta state government to assist the school by making its environment conducive for teaching and learning.
Also speaking on the state of things in the school, the Assistant Head Teacher of the school, Lady Caroline Ezeachi, corroborated the Head Teacher, begging for assistance from the state government.
When The Nation went round the school compound, it was observed that the hoodlums did not only vandalize and steal fittings from the facility, they also defecate in the classrooms.
It was also observed that one of the classroom blocks’ roofing had been blown off with residents around the school dumping refuse indiscriminately there.