By Kese Werugha
Kilifi North Member of Parliament Owen Baya has decried the shortage of teachers in the region.
He said the biting shortage of tutors is to blame poor academic performance of students in national examinations.
Speaking during official opening ceremony of Kiwandani Secondary School, Baya said the county was experiencing a shortage of 3,500 teachers.
“The deficit of teachers has rendered the county unable to get at least a mean grade of A in the last year’s KCSE, this is a big shame to the local leaders and education stakeholders”, he lamented.
Baya said that Kilifi County will never score an A if the margin of teacher deficit was not covered, noting that the bigger area facing that loss was the science teaching staff.
The legislator who is a former lecturer at Pwani University expressed concern that the county has few teachers to tackle subjects like Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry and Physics which are the main contributors to scoring a mean grade of A.
He further said this has caused the region to fail in undertaking technical courses in universities and other institutions of higher learning and students are only left to doing Arts for their careers.
“Despite the problem our county is also suffering from the high teacher transfers under the delocalisation policy by Teachers Service Commission (TSC)”, he added.
Baya said that he is determined to improve the level of education in his constituency and has built and renovated over 10 schools both primary and secondary within a span of one year in office.
