Lagos public school where students sit on cratered floor

The noise from the last floor of the two-storey building at Ilogbo Elegba Senior Grammar School, Oto-Awori Local Council Development Area (LCDA), in Lagos State could be heard from a distance. The floor is occupied by senior secondary school 1 students.

In their dilapidated and dusty classrooms, hundreds of students sat on the bare floor and babbled animatedly. Apart from the question papers and answer sheets each was peering at occasionally, nothing in the atmosphere indicated that the students were writing their first term examination in the ongoing 2021/2022 academic session.

Some placed their writing materials on their laps, others on the dusty floors. Some who probably arrived early stood by the windows, using the sills as writing tables.

“If not that this is an examination, many of us would have waited until classes end and copy (lesson notes) from our friends who had used our backs as tables,” one of the students told our reporter.

She said some students used to bring chairs from home.

“When you bring chairs, even when you write your names boldly on them, they are either stolen or deliberately vandalised,” the teenager said.

An alumnus of the school, who asked not to be named to avoid being identified by the school authorities, decried the conditions at the public school in the Nigerian city.

“Everyone is used to it. The SS 1 classrooms have been like that for many years, even when I schooled here. I left the school in 2017 and I met the SS 1 classes in that condition, although it wasn’t this bad. My elder brother also met the classes in the same condition, so it has been like that for some time,” the alumnus said.

Another student said she gets to school early so that she could “use the window to write for the day.”

She said students find it very difficult to concentrate in her class.

“Many students talk while classes are ongoing, some play with cell phones. It is worse when rain falls because the roof is already blown off,” she added.

Like students like teachers

The teachers’ staff room, sharing the same floor with the SS 1 classes, is not better off than the classrooms. The floor is cratered with a few chairs fixed in a corner.

A female teacher, who was one of the few teachers present when this reporter visited during the recently concluded second term, was struggling to find somewhere to place the notes she was teaching from.

To review any of the students’ books, the teacher would walk to the entrance of the classroom so she could use the rays of the sun to aid her vision.

The teachers and the students at the school, whom this reporter spoke to, all asked not to be named for fear of victimisation.

The teachers who spoke said they had to be careful so as not to be “sent to remote areas as punishment.”

Other classes in good shape

However, aside from those occupied by the SS 1 students on the top floor, other classrooms are in fairly good conditions. There was a desk for each of the majority of the students but a few were seen sharing.

The senior secondary school 2 and 3 classes are in a new building where the chairs and tables are relatively neat and the classrooms habitable. But no one would explain why the SS 1 classrooms were left in such poor conditions.

A joint web portal of the Lagos State Government and Global Education Media Nigeria Limited- Lagos State Schools Online, captured this inconsistency in the standard of school facilities in Lagos.

Corroboration

According to the portal, Ilogbo Elegba Senior Grammar School has been poorly funded and furnished since its inception. It said when the school was established in January 1989, it had 125 students and shared classrooms with Local Authority Primary School, Ilogbo Elegba, with which it now shares a boundary.

“Another challenge was the lack of furniture for both staff and students. L.A Primary head teacher gave them 46 six pieces of dual desks and community members donated 100 collapsible chairs on February 5, 1990 when the then state governor, Raji Rasaki, commissioned the school building in 1994,” the website stated.

Today, the school, which sits on a large expanse of unfenced land, is said to have 1,950 students. More than 500 of this figure are said to be in SS 1.

Promise

However, the Chairman of the Lagos Special Committee on Rehabilitation of Public Schools, Hakeem Smith, told PREMIUM TIMES that Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has promised to touch all schools in the state that are in need of rehabilitation.

Mr Smith said the agency in its two years of existence has impacted many schools in the state.

“What we want to do is to spread our efforts to touch all the six geo-political zones. We know that there are some schools in worse condition than even the one at Ilogbo Elegba and we will visit them.

“The government has a responsibility so we have taken a note of this school. We usually want the principal to write a letter to us, then we will go and do a proper assessment of the school in terms of what they need and put it in our database,” Mr Smith told PREMIUM TIMES.

“We have about 700 schools in the state requiring such attention. What we do is go through our database to see those that have requested and attend to them. I have noted this and I can assure you that my team will visit the school soon.

“But like I said, there is a procedure to follow. So if we visit tomorrow, work may not start immediately because there is a budget cycle, and now that the budget has been passed, the state has to issue a warrant to incur expenditure,” he added.

Mr Smith further noted that the process has to also go through the procurement processes before shortlisting it.

“This is the rule so that we don’t run afoul of the law,” he said.

He said his committee is building about 300 classrooms and hostels and providing about 100,000 furniture in secondary and primary schools.

Giving his account at the end of 2021, he said the state government has completed classrooms and boarding facilities in some public schools in the state. Among these are the newly built block of classrooms at Lagos State Model College, Igbokuta, Ikorodu, which he said was commissioned on December 10, 2021; and another in the Elemoro area of the state.