Over 200 students at Chania Boys High school in Kiambu County had to seek alternative places to spend the night after their two dormitories went up in flames destroying property worth millions.
The fire is reported to have started in the wee hours of the night forcing the school management to hold the students in classes.
According to witnesses who declined to be named, the two dormitories were set ablaze by the students who were agitating to be allowed to go home.
Also Read:
"They had that their counterparts at Thika High school had been dismissed and were also demanding to be allowed to leave the school but it was too late in the night. The school management could not allow them to leave at 3:00 am," a witness said.
Students' personal items among them clothes were burnt in the process, making the well-performing school the latest to have been enlisted in the growing unrest across the country.
Politicians, counselors, and religious leaders in Kiambu county are now calling on the government to make prompt interventions to arrest the situation that has been attributed to the pressure to catch up with the syllabus that was affected by the onset of Covid-19.
Led by Kiambu Deputy governor Joyce Ngugi, Ruiru MP Simon King'ara, and a group of clergymen from Kiambu and Nairobi Counties, the concerned stakeholders said the growing indiscipline was largely facilitated by the students long stay at home.
"Burning of schools is a way of students expressing themselves and making it known to teachers that they want to go home. They are not only tired but also affected in one way or another by the pandemic. Some are grappling with anxiety while others are doing this under high influence of drugs," said the deputy governor.
Her sentiments were echoed by Ruiru MP Simon King’ara who said the perennial school’s unrest should be addressed by the relevant agencies through researching the root cause of the conflict and offering viable solutions.
“The agencies should research and come up with practical solutions to our problems in schools. They also need to consider re-introduction of caning as it worked in the previous years,” said the MP.
The leaders made the comments days after the education ministry revised the high school calendar for the second term and allowed a four-day break in a bid to suppress the growing unrest in schools.
In a circular issued last week, education principal secretary Julius Jwan revealed that students will go for their half-term break from November 19 and will resume learning on November 23, a development that contradicted the initial government’s calendar that had excluded the mid-term break as students were to break for Christmas holidays on December 23.
Pressure has been mounting on the education ministry to ease the pressure brought about by a demanding crash program and which has been largely blamed for turbulence in schools.
