Dagoreti North MP Beatrice Elachi on Monday proposed the scrapping of primary boarding schools in the country to prevent tragedies such as the one witnessed at Hillside Endarasha Academy, raising a debate that has been mooted as to whether boarding schools should be done away with .
‘’No primary school should be a boarding institution. Let parents take care of their children till they reach high school,’’ Elachi stated.
The lawmaker maintained that the ages of children who perished at Endarasha Academy were too young to escape the incident that befell them, pointing to a gap that might probably have been ignored in terms of immediate care to the children.
The lawmaker further called upon parents to take responsibility and stop shying away from the role of taking care of their children.
Elachi stated that children at Endarasha Academy could not take care of themselves, indicating that parents and teachers had a role to play in preventing the tragedy.
‘’Did they have a matron? Boys need a lot of support and they needed to have someone looking after them,'' she added.
The MP linked the recent incident to a case of psychological gaps that might have existed, maintaining that many school-going children, especially boys, keep issues to themselves.
‘’Boys keep many things to themselves as opposed to girls and that is why it was wrong to have them on their own. They needed someone to be with them at the dormitories,’’ she added.
Elachi hinted that the children might have choked from the smoke that engulfed the dormitory and called on parents to keep a close watch on children noting that boys needed a lot of support as opposed to girls.
‘’These children were asleep. It means they were choked by the smoke and it was not easy for them to escape,’’ she added.
There have been calls to abolish boarding schools in the country with the Ministry of Education in 2023 backtracking on the proposals saying that the schools were important especially to parents in nomadic areas.
