Ngora deaf pupils strike over facilities

Ngora

Pupils of Ngora School for the Deaf on Saturday morning went on strike demanding immediate transfer of their head teacher for allegedly failing to attend to their problems.

The children with hearing impairment, most of whom are boys, enrolled for vocational skills training at the school escaped from the school, at dawn and walked for more than 3kms to the office of the Resident District Commissioner with a memo they had prepared to present to the district authorities but were stopped on the way by police.

During an urgent meeting convened by the district education and security authorities to address their grievances, the pupils complained of poor feeding, sale of oranges from the school farm and not ploughing back the proceeds for their welfare and inadequate accommodation facilities.

The grievances
In the memorandum copied to the district LC5 chairperson, the pupils are concerned too that some of the teachers are not providing them with adequate sign language lessons and are harsh to the pupils, most of them with serious hearing disability.

“The teachers are not serious, they beat us for failing to express ourselves well in sign language and the food we are served with in most cases is very bad,” one of the deaf representatives said.

The memo further contained a concern that academic performance at the school, one of the oldest special needs facilities in the east had continued to worsen, a condition they are blaming on poor administration of the school.
Ngora inspector of schools Milton Okuna said the situation at the school had been aggravated by limited funding that it receives from the government.

He said despite being a special needs institution, Ngora school for the deaf had continued to receive the same funding ratio like for other schools for normal children under government’s Universal Primary Education (UPE).

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