Stacy Okyere, a Form 1 student who had only been at the school for a month, died on February 4.
The family claims the school’s inactivity caused their daughter’s death.
“The school has killed my child”, father of Miss Okyere, Kingsley Okyere said.
A high-ranking official at Aburi Girls Senior High School refuted the claim. According to the source, the young woman did not die at school.
Nonetheless, Kingsley Okyere claims his daughter, who is also his first child, had no underlying disease and wants the school to offer a more complete account of the events leading up to her passing.
Distraught and obviously outraged, he believes the school should have brought his daughter to the hospital as a first step, but instead requested that he go from home to do so.
“I received a call at 8pm on Sunday 4th February from my daughter’s housemistress. She asked me to come and pick my daughter up to the hospital, because she was sick. I even felt it was too late, but I still decided to go. On my way the woman kept calling almost every two minutes, I was even angry because I expected her to at least send my daughter to the hospital first before calling me”, he said.
“I used 34 minutes from Ablekuma to Aburi girls. I was driving at top speed and was even stopped by the police who later understood it was an emergency.”
Mr. Okyere claims that his daughter reported feeling unwell around 12 p.m., but when he came at the school, especially the Edinburg House, he observed a shocking scene.
“When I got to the school my daughter was lying on the floor and her mates had surrounded her. She was unconscious, meanwhile the housemistress was sitting on a chair in another room. My wife started screaming and crying. I was so shocked at what I saw that I became weak all of a sudden”, he said.
As upset as he was, Mr. Okyere claims he took his daughter to the Tetteh Quarshie Memorial Hospital in Mampong in the hopes that she might be saved.
“I carried my daughter from the floor and rushed to the car. My friend drove us to Tetteh Quarshie memorial hospital at Mampong and while we were in the car, I kept blowing air through my daughter’s mouth to try and keep her alive.”
But Kingsley Okyere soon realised, it was too late. “When we got to Mampong I carried her on my back, and when the doctors saw her, they knew she was already gone. They didn’t even know how to tell me, so they kept sending me around to go and take a card for her and make other arrangements. And when I returned, they finally told me she had died before we even got to the hospital. I was devastated.”
The news had come as a shock to her entire family, who say Stacy never had any underlying disease.
“My daughter has no health issue. You can even make enquiries at her former school they will tell you that she rarely gets sick”, Mr. Okyere insist.
“The school has killed my child and when the issue happened, they had the guts to sit me down and tell me they will buy the coffin and provide an ambulance. If I didn’t have money, would I have brought my child to school in the first place?”
The incident, according to the Executive Director of Africa Education Watch Kofi Asare says the incident as narrated by the family highlights “symptoms of weak health and safety facilities and protocols in our schools.”
“The health facilities and protocols are nonexistent in many schools. Many schools don’t have resident nurses, first aid drugs are a luxury and there is no documented guidelines from GES on how to manage health issues”, he told
While there is no existing protocol, Asare says the practice about how to deal with sick students has always been standard.
“When a student reports sick, the complaint gets to the health prefect, housemaster or mistress and then the student would be referred to the sick bay where first aid is provided and then an advice is provided on whether they go home or are sent to the hospital,” he explained.
“Based on the gravity of the situation, the student would be taken to hospital by the school after which parents are informed. That is why it is a requirement every child must have a functioning NHIS card which is a condition precedent to admission.
“You don’t call a parent to take their sick ward to school You call them to inform them you have taken their sick ward to hospital”, he added.
Mr. Okyere is especially outraged that the school did not consider it necessary to take his daughter to the hospital.
“I asked the housemistress why the school took health insurance when my girl was enrolled. Because she wouldn’t have been admitted without it. So, what is the use of that health insurance? And why couldn’t this woman send my child to the hospital at least. So, if I was at Bole Bamboi, I would have to drive all the way to Aburi Girls just to pick my daughter to the hospital?”
Attempts to obtain the school’s side of the story were useless. The Assistant Headmaster forwarded us to the Headmistress, who refused to interview the team after more than three hours. The school’s administrators stated that the Headmistress was unavailable.
Meanwhile, parents of pupils at the school have expressed serious worries regarding the institution’s health care. This became an agenda item at one of the Parents Association meetings, during which they expressed concerns about how the large student population “has caused considerable stress on the limited resources of the school clinic, and the school clinic has run out of medication and is currently forced to refer most cases to the hospital.”
Specifically, the parents complained about the school of to have more nurses.
