The dead school council and the disappearing school fees
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 24/Aug/2010 11:12, 34 days ago
Before I left Cameroon for the summer three out of the four schools I work with had writtenschool development‘action plans’for next year. They were the result of community meetings and strong collaboration between teachers, fathers, mothers, and the village elites. One of my schools had no action plan, fewer teachers than this time last year, and a chronic debt problem. As I prepare to go back to Cameroon in a couple of weeks thinking of ways to sort out this school is one of my top priorities.Calling meetings at this school is difficult. A few months ago we went to see the headmaster to organise a meeting the following week. He promised to alert the members of the School Council (half of whom are dead, more on that in a moment) and the Parents’ association. We called in to remind him a couple of days later. He promised us everyone was informed. When we turned up for the meeting the headmaster was not there (the teachers told us he’d gone home) and the President of the Parents’ association (and no-one else from the committee) arrived an hour late, saying he’d hadn’t been informed of the meeting until that day.The President of the School Council absolutely fails to come to meetings, co-operate with our project, or do any work for the school. Everyone knows this. Unfortunately it’s impossible to change the School Council because the President is a political heavyweight in the village so everyone is much too scared to ask him to resign. Meanwhile half of the original committee have died since the committee was formed twenty-five years ago. Have they been replaced, I asked?No. Will they be? No.Meanwhile the Parents’ Association has its own problems. The main job of a Parents’ association in a Cameroonian primary school is to collect school fees and recruit and pay untrained teachers (who get paid about £14 a month). The Cameroonian government insists that primary education is free, but if it was there would be about one teacher for every 300 students in my schools.In my problem school, despite the fact that there are about 1300 students to collect fees from, the Parents’ association is heavily in debt to teachers they didn’t pay last year, and hadn’t hired any teachers in the school for the past two months. Their last remaining teacher was fired after turning up at school one day a week over a long period. They didn’t know how long he’d been doing this because they’d never discussed it with the headmaster.It turned out VSO was partly to blame for this state of affairs; working with a partner organisation, RESAEC, they also recruit untrained local teachers for the schools to try and bring down class sizes (up to 180 students in each class at this school). After RESAEC did their recruitment the Parents’ Association decided they didn’t need to pay teachers any more, and fired all their teachers at the school.Because the Parents’ Association had stopped collecting school fees some of the teachers decided to take matters into their own hands. When a student tried to pay their fees to their teacher the teacher would simply pocket the money. The Parents’ Association knew this was going on, but hadn’t taken any serious measures to stop it.We asked the President a few questions about the situation. Did he know how much money had been taken? No, he didn’t.Did he know how much money had been paid out by the Parents’ Association in wages that year? No, he didn’tDid he know how much money was owed to teachers from the previous year? No, he didn’t. He was also quite angry with us for asking so many difficult questions.One of my big targets for next year is finding solutions for this schools many problems (not all of which are listed above). We’re already part of the way there; we had a big meeting with the Inspector about how the Parents’ Association can become more transparent and collect more school fees. This was not all plain sailing; the President of the Parents’ Association kept saying things to my national volunteer in frontof me like “can you tell that white girl that I don’t think she should have called this meeting”, but we did come up with some productive ideas and he is now talking to me again.Several VSO volunteers are also working to make sure that when RESAEC recruits new teachers the teachers hired by the parents aren’t fired. In the long term we want the parents, the Council and the Government to recruit and pay enough teachers so that RESAEC teachers aren’t needed.Our top priority is that this school will keep clear financial records: corruption is crippling Cameroon from the top down. We need to try and stop a situation where children sit in the classroom and watch their teachers embezzling money from their schools.