Tehisuma School - Donate!
This is a story that you can be a part of! With just $7,800, we're going to build a primary school that will leave a lasting impact, bringing better opportunity to underprivileged children in my community. But we'll need your help.
-->Give the gift of education! Donate to the Tehisuma School via the Peace Corps Partnership Program today.
-->100% of your tax deductible contribution will go directly to the school.
[Project Summary]
Who: The Tehisuma School is a successful community-based kindergarten that is requesting your help as it is expanded into a primary school.
What: Construction of a rigorous primary school for levels 1-3 and finishing an incomplete kindergarten building.
Where: Tamaligu, Northern Region, Ghana (a rural village of 2,500 people)
When: Construction to begin in early 2015, pending funding. Local contributions will fund fewer upgrades before the 2015 rainy season regardless of grant. Successful funding will allow kindergarten K1, K2 and primary levels 1, 2 and 3 to be offered in fall 2015.
Why: Two issues drive this project: (1) the 40 year-old public primary school has become overcrowded as the town grew and the school remained the same size, and (2) many members of the community are not satisfied with the public school's performance, particularly with English education, and would like a better option for their children – an option where they are first-level stakeholders in their children's education.
How: Through community investment and your help! The local investment is $3,900, or 33% of the total project cost plus monthly tuition and fees. This is a substantial sum in the village and is loan-free. The remaining funds, $7,800 are requested in the grant. Donate here!
[The Tehisuma story] Thirty kindergarteners are in an open air classroom with a dirt floor and mud walls. They're dressed in oversized, torn black and gold uniforms, but everyone works with what they have. It's late morning on a typical day: sunny and 90 something degrees at the Tehisuma School in Tamaligu, northern Ghana.
The kids face a makeshift chalkboard on a makeshift rickety tripod, and Jacob, a local and Peace Corps community counterpart, leads an English lesson. They're forming three letter nouns using small magnetic letters sent from my family back home. He calls on Deeshini, a small girl who from the community, who comes up and attaches “C”, “A” and “T” to three nails on the tripod.
She might not realize it yet, but for Deeshini and all of the other students in Tamaligu, English – despite being Ghana's national, business language – is a foreign language more important than their native one when it comes to educational opportunities.
Tehisuma Headmaster Abubakari Tawfik, better known as Master Alolo, enjoys bragging that his 4-year old kindergarten students know more English than some of the students at the local junior high – a claim that isn't exaggerated much at all. Learning English and teachers who take teaching in the Dagbanli-speaking village seriously are the primary reasons why Tehisuma exists.
Tehisuma, which means “good thinking” in Dagbanli, is a community-funded school that was founded by Alolo, a group of educationally-minded parents and Tamaligu Chief Yakubu Abdulai. Holding their first classes in the fall of 2013 in a parent's house, they sought to bring change to their community after the local public primary school wouldn't and continued to achieve lackluster standards for years and years.
As a successful kindergarten with broad community support and enrollment, they built and immediately opened their yet-to-be-finished kindergarten block in spring 2014. The group's plan is to open primary levels as the current class of kindergarteners advances, but due to a variety of factors, this does not appear practical without outside resources. Expanding in a realistic, sustainable way would require financing, which the cash-strapped school has no access to. This is why we've opened a grant requesting funds through the Peace Corps Partnership Program. Doing so, we'll be able to get this school off the ground and functioning on its own.
One of the school's central goals is to advance fluent English speakers to JHS, reasonable enough given JHS is taught entirely in English. This goal is shared by the local public primary school on paper, but is far from reality. Understanding English is the toughest learning obstacle for most students.
In Ghana, only primary schools are taught in select local languages, of which more than 70 are spoken throughout the country. To bring everyone together, students are to be proficient through level four English in P-4, and fluent by P-6. At least in Tamaligu and many other rural communities, only a small minority of students are able to follow this curriculum on-schedule, setting them years back once advanced to JHS. As a weekly teacher at the JHS, I stopped meeting the 50-student form 1 class (7th grade) after our first session because most of the students hadn't a clue of what I was saying. In the classes I teach, form 2 has about 25 students and form 3 has 15.
There's a few reasons for the significant drop in attendance. One is that most students are advanced from primary several years behind in English. Students are unable to understand teachers or materials and must repeat the level, creating a backlog and waiting list. Some drop out because they are so far behind or otherwise discouraged. Many students move in with family in larger nearby towns that have better schools, where most of Tamaligu's teachers come from.
Being assigned jobs away from their homes, too many of the teachers at the public primary bring an attitude of having to “come down” to the village level. This attitude clearly causes some negative repercussions on the local community that go undisciplined. Most teachers travel home on weekends, show up late to work on Mondays and leave early on Fridays. This is why I'm scheduled to teach after the first session every Friday.
Over time, these unacceptable standards became the norm, or some sort of “tradition.” The PTA, with many members who went to the same school, don't see an issue with the teachers' unexcused absences. Locals seem to hold the view that teachers know best and have the final say. There's no problem when teachers send their students to work on their personal farms during school hours. PTA members did the same thing when they were in school, so that's the way it is – that's education as they know it.
Following the educational system starting in the village isn't easy. Some of the students from smaller communities nearby walk three miles or more to school every day. This common story of students walking miles to school isn't the real challenge. By simply being enrolled in the local public primary, you're immediately put at a disadvantage to students who live in larger towns or cities. This disadvantage becomes apparent every July, when form 3 JHS students write exams for limited openings in regional senior high schools. These schools also follow a hierarchy, with the best being in cities. Such schools have fast deadlines on tuition payments, due just weeks after placement. If a form 3 student from the village is placed into a good senior high school, they rush to make the deadlines, often unsuccessfully, ceding their spaces to students who can afford them – also more likely to be living in the city.
To put it simply, the favor is not in the rural student's hand when it comes to education. Those who get through it successfully, such as Alolo and Chief Abdulai, recognize this cyclical problem and cringe by putting their children through the same process. It certainly doesn't invite those who receive advanced educations to come back home.
Hopefully, these students will one day realize how to more consciously deal with protecting their native language and culture – if not at risk from Ghana's official language, then in an ever-globalizing world. As for now, parents and students will do whatever it takes to seek opportunity outside the community. For most people, the options are to go to school or go to farm.
Alolo left his job at the public primary to start the school in fall 2013, then as a teacher-in-training. At that point, the kindergarten building was still under construction and classes were held in a couple of vacant rooms at our local assemblyman's house, also unfinished. By the time I moved to Tamaligu last April, the kindergarten building had just been “completed.” Alolo had to buy at least one door for the four-room, three classroom building to lock materials up at night.
Their long term plan is to offer primary levels as the first class of students progresses. With the prospect of expanding and receiving grant money, they created a Board of Trustees. Chief Abdulai is at the head, who was a heavy personal investor in the kindergarten building. Alolo and the Chief ambitiously won't rule out building their own JHS one day, should the school be successful.
I don't believe Tehisuma will be sustainable or as successful without outside help. Being a health volunteer in a community where most diseases are caused by poor sanitation, we're working to emphasize health through education and improved sanitation standards. With this startup, they should be able to generate enough money to independently expand to a full primary school within three years, when the current class of kindergarteners advances to P-4.
Most of the grant ($7,800 – 67% of total cost) will be spent on non-local or upgraded building materials, such as concrete, sheet roofing, lumber and rebar. That is, not the local standard of mud construction, thatch roofing and natural lumber. Nearly half of the grant will be spent on concrete to eliminate the recurring maintenance costs and short lifespan of mud-constructed buildings.
The community portion ($3,900 – 33% of total cost) mostly covers labor, local building materials, the kitchen and cooking materials, electrical work and splits the cost with some of the upgraded materials.
$3,900 is a lot of money in the village, where just $1 worth of food is more than enough to keep you full all day. Parents and community members are expected to contribute through a series of fundraisers. But it won't be easy. Alolo said that some parents didn't contribute to kindergarten construction until they saw the actual building being built, fearing that the money will be “chopped” in a culture whose financial system is based on family and friends rather than banks. We recognize that it's a lot of money to ask for on both ends, but this group is right to handle the need.
The joy in working with Tehisuma is that they're organized and share a “can-do” attitude – perhaps a great example of what receiving an education can produce. The working culture is very different from that at the public school. Everyone on Tehisuma's staff lives in the community full-time and feels personally invested in the success of the project.
We hope that you'll also make the Tehisuma primary school a reality with your generous donation. With just a few dollars or a hundred dollars, any amount helps us reach the goal. Please let me know if you have any questions!
Remember, 100% of your contribution will directly fund the school, and it's tax deductible!
