Madam Veronica Dong, the Headmistress of the St. Don Bosco Special School, has appealed for logistics and infrastructure support to alleviate the plight of the pupils.
She said the school, located at Loho in the Nadowli-Kaleo District, did not have any means of transport to respond to emergencies.
She said the school authorities were compelled to rely on motorbikes and tricycles to transport children to health facilities in times of emergency.
Madam Dong, who said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency at Loho, said a child had to die due to the delay in getting a vehicle to the hospital when she fell sick.
“The school has no means of transport of any kind. So, when we have cases like sickness, teachers pick the patient up on a motorbike to the nearest health facility.
“If the case is severe then we have to rely on the services of tricycles to transport the person to the nearest health facility for healthcare,” she intimated.
Madam Dong added that they had to also resort to a tricycle (Motorking) to transport foodstuff from the market to the school, a situation she described as worrying.
She stressed the need for in-service training for the teachers to equip them with the basic skills to handle the children with special education needs as only three out of the ten teachers had special skills training.
The children at the Don Bosco Special School were trained in daily living skills, self-help skills, functional academics, social skills, life skills, and vocational skills.
“They are into skills training so you should have basic knowledge in the skills in which you will be training them.
“If you are not specially trained on that and you are not well equipped, how do you impart knowledge,” Madam Dong said.
Regarding infrastructure, the headmistress indicated that the school was bedevilled with inadequate infrastructure including classrooms, dormitories for the children, accommodation for the staff, and a befitting kitchen.
She explained that due to the lack of accommodation, only two out of the four house mothers at the school could stay on campus at a time to care for the about 80 children with special needs at night, which had made it very difficult for them to effectively care for the children.
She also appealed for a befitting kitchen for the school as the food was prepared in a temporal structure that gets flooded anytime it rained and made it unfit to be a kitchen.
