The Ghana Education Service (GES) is holding a crunch meeting on Wednesday on how the senior high school (SHS) students who have tested positive to the coronavirus will write the West African Senior Schools Certificate Examination (WASCCE).
The meeting will be attended by representatives from the Ministry of Health, Ghana Health Service and the West African Examination Council (WAEC).
The Director-General of GES, Prof Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, who revealed this on Onua TV’s Maakye hosted by Bright Kwasi Asempa and Adowa Konadu-Yiadom on Wednesday, explained that the fact that they have tested positive to Covid-19 does not mean the children must not write the examination.
“Next week, [SHS students] are starting the examination and what we need is to see who are going to write the examination and how they will write. So that is why I am going to meet WAEC and health experts today,” he explained.
Prof Opoku-Amankwa said “when a student is sick and is taken to the hospital during an examination, the exams papers are sent to the student to write the examination at the hospital and that is what we are meeting today over the issue”.
The Director-General explained that a student will not be able to write the examination if he or she has broken down but as it stands now, none of the students is broken down.
Comparing Covid-19 to other illness
Prof Opoku-Amankwaa said “we want the children to write the examination to improve on their standards and it depends on health advice from the Ghana Health Service”.
“In the era that we did not have the Covid-19, there were instances where CSM and cholera broke out in some schools and if the health exerts believe that school should be closed, we have to do that,” he explained.
He said “some times some are a disaster which calls for closure and I don’t think we have gotten to a stage where schools must be closed for about 600 students to go home”.
Counseling
Prof Opoku-Amankwaa assured that the counseling unit of the GES has counselled all the students to psych them up ahead of the examination.
“We have counselled them. We have a counseling unit for that and we have counselled them because they were home and all of a sudden, they were asked to come to school”.
By Kweku Antwi-Otoo
