‘No child should stay at home during school time hours’, says Adelio Ojina Quinto, Technical Advisor in the State Ministry of Education in Eastern Equatoria State.
Radio Emmanuel quoted him advising parents and community leaders to set up measures punishing either a parent or learners who will fail to abide by the regulations without proper justification.
“All of us as parents and community members must see to it that we are not going to allow any child to remain at home when it is time for schooling, just say at about 8 AM, no child should be found staying at home and I need to advise you need to come up with measures, your local measures here how you would punish any person or child who had not come to school, find out where is the cause, is it a mother or a father? School is called a school when there are children and when there are teachers and activities as the school is going, children don’t come to school for no other good reason and because some us as parents very earlier in the morning they started doing wrong thing”, he cautions.
Ojina warns that the ministry together with the community will not tolerate those who engage themselves in alcohol leaving children loitering about in streets.
“Anybody found drinking during working time will be jailed”, says Ojina.
“You fail to send a child to school. It is the responsibility of the community. We are not going to leave anybody who leave children at home doing nothing and we are not going to leave anybody who start drinking in the morning lousing around in this village because you are also giving wrong lessons to children and let us work as a team it is a responsibility of the community by the way to make sure that nobody even get drunk during working hours, we are emphasizes even to take somebody to jail who louses around drinking at working hours”, he also warns.
The speaker was talking during the handover of a three classroom block at Ibalany on Monday.