16th August, 2018
The Plateau State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) has engaged voluntary teachers to undertake summer lessons for children in Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps.
Prof. Mathew Sule, SUBEB Executive Chairman, who disclosed this to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday in Jos, said that the measure was to enable the children recover grounds lost to their displacement.
Plateau has 27 IDPs camps hosting the more than 31,000 people displaced by the violence that hit the state between June and July, 2018.
The camps are located in four local governments – Bokkos, Riyom, Barkin-Ladi and Jos South.
According to Sule, the summer lessons will also prepare the pupils for secondary school placement examinations or for promotions to the next classes when schools resumed in September.
“We want to ensure that the children do not abandon their educational pursuit just because they have been displaced,” he said.
He regretted that some children had to flee their houses when they were writing examinations, saying that the lessons would serve as a form of continuity to ensure that there was no disconnect when they eventually resumed.
Sule said that SUBEB had also distributed warm clothing to the children to enable them cope with the cold weather they were exposed to, in the classrooms or assembly halls that had become their abodes.
The SUBEB boss, who said that the summer programme was adopting the conventional school curriculum, disclosed that the board was working towards developing a special curriculum for “education in an emergency situation”.
“Such curriculum will address peculiar challenges related to displacement of children or other similar situations.
“ The curriculum in an emergency situation will be developed in line with the national curriculum, but it shall have modifications to ease the teaching in IDPs camps.
“The modifications will include some special lessons by our guidance and counseling units on how children can deal with trauma.
“ We expect such lessons to serve as a healing therapy to help stabilise the traumatised children to assimilate what they are taught,” he said.
He said that a multi-grade teaching approach was being adopted in the camps because the classes were inadequate to accommodate children of same grades in the same classroom.
“What we are adopting is a pedagogical approach; it means that teachers must have the capacity to handle the teaching of different grades in a class,” he said.
A NAN correspondent, who visited some of the summer classes in the IDPs, observed that SUBEB had provided writing materials, text books and also play items to the children.