By Garba Abdullahi Bagwai
About 300 senior students of Government Girls Secondary School (GGSS) Janbulo Gwale Local Govt Kano, were trapped in their upstairs classrooms on Thursday after the staircase leading to the building collapsed during lesson hours.
The Principal of the school, Hajiya Jamila Mustafa Mai Nasara, said the incident occurred at about 1:00 p.m. while students were attending classes.
“We heard shouting from the one-storey building where about 300 students were taking lessons in two upstairs classrooms. We rushed to the area and discovered that the staircase had collapsed,” she said.
According to the principal, members of staff quickly brought a ladder, which was used to safely evacuate all the trapped students from the building.
She confirmed that no lives were lost and no student sustained any injury during the incident.
Hajiya Jamila explained that the school immediately informed the Kano State Secondary Schools Management Board by telephone and later submitted a comprehensive report detailing the incident and the condition of the affected building.
“It is very sad. We solely depend on these upstairs classrooms because they accommodate almost 30 percent of our science students,” she said.
She noted that the school had already been facing a serious shortage of classrooms before the incident, making it impossible to maintain the recommended class size of 40 students, as more than 120 students are currently accommodated in each classroom.
The principal appealed to the Kano State Government to urgently reconstruct the damaged staircase to enable students to resume lessons in the affected classrooms.
“Thankfully, schools are about to close for the third-term vacation and are expected to resume in September. We hope the government will repair the staircase before it resumes. Otherwise, we may have no option but to ask some students to remain at home because we do not have enough classrooms to accommodate them,” she said.
She added that the school currently has only eight classrooms and one laboratory, and with the affected block now unusable, only four classrooms remain available for teaching.
According to her, some classrooms now accommodate more than 130 students, making the learning environment severely overcrowded.
The principal further disclosed that the affected block was constructed about 16 years ago. She said the roof of the two upstairs classrooms had been leaking for the past four years before it was recently repaired,but still the entire block needed total renovation.
Efforts to obtain comments from Kano State Commissioner for Education, , were unsuccessful, as he did not respond to telephone calls.
