A directive by the Ghana Education Service (GES) banning Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) levies in second cycle schools is creating an impasse between school heads and the GES.
According the GES, although acknowledges the usefulness of the levies, their addition to the school bill has become burdensome, and therefore schools should no longer collect the levies on behalf of the PTA.
The GES explains that since the PTA is an association, it should find other ways of collecting its dues from members, without affecting the students and the school bill.
The directive is part of efforts by the GES to streamline the items on the school bill for Senior High Schools and Technical and Vocational Training Schools, so as to remove cost as a barrier to secondary or technical education.
But the school heads contend that disallowing them to collect the dues reduces their control of the PTA fund which they use to complement funding of the school activities.
The school heads, who are signatories to PTA Accounts, are unhappy with the directive since according to them, would deny the schools of the supplementary funding.
In order the address the challenge, the National Council of Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), says it plans to hold a consultative meeting with relevant stakeholders over the suspension of PTA levies.
Alexander Yaw Danso, National President of the Association, indicates that the association would also meeting to discuss the directive.
“We were asked to collect our own dues and levies as an association and run the way we wanted it. Some of the school heads are peeved because they are no longer collecting the dues. They [heads] were making use of the dues because there was a circular that these heads should be signatories to the PTA accounts. Now, that they have been asked to wash their hands away from the PTA dues, they are peeved and not prepared to back off PTA activities,” he noted.
He believed that the stakeholder consultation would “give us an opportunity to sit down with the GES, the Education Ministers and other officials to look at the way forward.”
By Edmund Mingle/ adrdaily.com
