What ails this primary school?

“What is the plural of the word ‘boy’?”, we asked Standard Eight pupils at Nyakemincha Primary School on the first day of the new term two weeks ago. It was supposed to be a trick to warm our way into their hearts, our version of an ice-breaker.

Well, warm ourselves into their little hearts we did — if the huge smiles on their faces was anything to go by when we posed that question — but, a minute later, no one had volunteered to tell us what the plural of ‘boy’ is.

To break the uncomfortable muteness, a 14-year-old boy eerily said “we don’t know”, and that pronouncement ushered in yet another period of total silence that stunk of shame and pain. (Names have been withheld throughout this story to respect the minors’ privacy).

There were six pupils in the room, shared by class eight and class five learners, and they all stared into nothingness that warm January morning, their faces as blank as the blackboard in front of them.

Nyakemincha, their school, is no different from many others in the area. Classrooms are brick-walled affairs with cemented floors while teachers live in mud houses nearby. The school has electricity and the architecture is reasonable brick-and-mortar. Basically, they are not that badly off in the infrastructure department, so what went wrong here last year?

The 14-year-old who told us they did not know the plural of ‘boy’ managed 183 marks out of 500 in his last Standard Seven exam. The top performer in that class scored a measly 196. Things are bad here.

A general state of dishonour ruled the school when we visited on Opening Day. The attendance was less than 30 pupils, even though teachers told us they expected over 250 children to report to their respective classes.

Of the 30 were new faces transferring to the school after failing to qualify for the next class in their former schools, while others had come in from private ‘academies’ whose KCPE results had been cancelled over exam irregularities.

In the office, the deputy head teacher, Mr Wycliffe Onyancha, slumped in his chair, letting out a long, deliberate sigh as we sought answers to the school’s poor performance.

Being an administrator at Nyakemincha, he says, is not an easy task. There is constant interference from church sponsors who only want their faithful to lead the school. Add that to the “heavily politicised school management committees” that chase away any teachers they do not fancy; clan and family politics and parents too drunk to care for their children and you get a recipe for total disaster.

Before Mr Onyancha and the new headteacher assumed office, the school management committee members had incited students to chase away the then headteacher, Mr David Orina, from the school over poor results and a disagreement over the use of the government’s free education monies.

To show you how dreaded the place is, the new headteacher posted to replace Mr Orina refused to report to Nyakemincha and instead requested education officials to either post him elsewhere as a regular teacher or sack him altogether.

When he reported at the school in 2011, Mr Onyancha told us, he was shocked to find Standard Eight pupils who could barely read and write. There were exam candidates in that class who had repeated three or four times in one class. Others had been chased away from every other school around for poor performance.

Surprisingly, last year’s results didn’t shock the parents. Out of the 25 candidates who sat the exam, the best pupil scored 188 marks, the last 79. The school performed so poorly nationally (it posted a mean score of 119.36) that the next worst performer, Kathukini Primary School of Kitui County, was ahead by a mean of 10 points.

Because it is difficult to judge a school’s performance by a single measure when so many factors determine academic performance, DN2 spent days in the area trying to figure out what went so horribly wrong.

Nyakemincha is located in Nyamira County near Kebirigo town along a dusty stretch where a local administrator is on suspension for dereliction of duty. Teachers said that over 10 of last year’s candidates were “special need cases or emotionally disturbed”.

Some were too angry or too sad to learn and had “a history of grave behavioural problems”. One of them, teachers said, was “a loner who rarely interacted with his classmates”. According to Mr Onyancha, some of the pupils would stay out of class for weeks whenever they were admonished over their bad scores.

One such bad example was a 17-year-old girl who only managed to score above 20 per cent in one subject. When we sought to speak to her, the father shielded her from us, saying there was nothing wrong with his daughter as far as he was concerned, and that all that mattered to him was that she was okay, health-wise.

In another case, a boy who enrolled in class one at age six and left at 19 managed 129 marks in KCPE — after 13 years in school.

In 2010, the school committee considered the pupils as “lost causes”. One of its recommendations was to ask them to stop wasting time with education and instead spend their resources doing something more helpful with their lives. The trouble pupils were promoted to class eight so that they could “at least leave primary school with a certificate”.

“I remember a heated school management committee meeting during which it was agreed that all of these pupils be promoted to Standard Eight so that they could sit their exams and go home to find something better to do with their lives,” recalls Bernard Onduko, a committee member.

“The pupils had also grown tired of learning and told us they just wanted to get their primary school certificates and head off to other callings.”

“In a class of 25, only 10 could correctly write their names without copying. Getting them to score 50 marks in an examination was not easy and we were always the last in zonal exams,” teacher Charles Maronga recalls.

“For last year’s KCPE, teachers photocopied the 2010 exam sheet, wrote each candidate’s name and other details and pinned them on the examination desk. Even with this, others could still not copy their correct details and were asked to do so under supervision after each paper,” a candidate, Evans Mobegi, said.

If there were about 15 “poor ones”, then why did the other 10 “good ones” not perform well? We posed this question to a group of teachers, who reasoned that the poor ones must have pulled down the performance of the rest “just as a bad fruit spoils the rest”.

But a number of the “good ones” we spoke to blame the poor performance on shoddy syllabus coverage. They said the school timetable was rarely followed and that, by the time they were sitting the examinations, only the English syllabus had been covered.

Teachers often chased each other out of classrooms for coming at the wrong time or coming late and eating into to the next lesson, they said.

By October 2011, the Standard Eight syllabus was partly covered, the pupils claimed. “We did not even learn Geometry and Algebra,” one of them said.

One science teacher, alleged a former pupil, rarely kept time and, when he eventually found his way into class, used most of the time to regale students with stories about his school days. This pupil scored seven per cent in science, and only two candidates scored 30 per cent and above in that subject.

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