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{
    "id": 1525226,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1525226/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 158,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Alego Usonga, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Samwel Atandi",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "of those counties are big and wide with many schools. Therefore, creating sub-county education boards will help by having a small team that focuses only on the sub-counties to ensure high education standards and quality. For instance, if you visit a county with five sub-counties when Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) or Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) results are released, you find that one sub-county has done very well. In contrast, the other sub-counties have done so poorly. This means that this particular board is not effective in handling this specific function across all the sub-counties. Therefore, having a sub-county education board that focuses on one sub-county will ensure quality performance in our schools. The other role of the County Education Boards is to approve the creation of new schools. I have had difficulty starting new schools because of the ineffectiveness of the County Education Boards. The number of times they sit and the availability of membership, when they call meetings, would take a year to start a new school. Some of these new schools are a result of public participation. The communities are asking for schools, but the approvers take years to do it. When we have the Sub-County Education Board, it will be quicker to address some of the requests that come out of public participation from the community. There is another function that I believe the creation of Sub-County Education Boards is going perform. This is my problem; we have the Free Day Secondary School System. Day secondary school is free, but parents are asked to pay for the school feeding programme. The amount of fees that secondary school day scholars pay is for the payment of the school feeding programme. The County Education Board determines how much money parents should pay for the school feeding programme. Sometimes a Member may arrange for parents to pay less, but then you are told that the County Education Board already determined and fixed the amount of money that should be paid. This is sometimes unfair. If we have a Sub-County Education Board that is purely within a constituency, we can easily agree with them on the amount parents are to pay for the school feeding programme, for instance, Ksh5,000. When a County Education Board is supposed to look at this matter and make decisions, it becomes very cumbersome for colleagues to determine something like this. I submit that this is a very progressive piece of law. I urge Members to look at it and approve it so that it helps us, first of all, to ensure that we improve standards of education within our sub-counties and also to ensure that there is efficiency on matters that touch on the approval of new schools, and any other matter that is consistent with the Education Act. There is something that I also propose that we can consider as an amendment. I do not believe that churches have a role to play in our schools. We have churches as sponsors of schools, and therefore, they have representatives in the schools. I do not think they have a role to play in this arrangement. I will be introducing a Bill to amend the Basic Education Act to delete the role of the church or religion in the affairs of schools. According to me, churches have worked towards creating weak management in schools. In a case where a school is sponsored by the Catholic or Anglican Church, even when a principal or a headmaster is not performing, the church must have a say in whether the principal sits there or not. I know of a case where the community wants a particular principal to leave, but the church says no. The church does not look at performance but at prayers and things like that. They do not even know how the school is performing. When they come to school, they do not ask for the school's results and how the school performs. They do not ask how the principal works. They also do not ask if the school has positive results. They are not interested in that. The church is only interested in prayers. This House needs to consider deleting the responsibility of churches in the affairs of our schools. Hon. Temporary Speaker, I submit. Thank you."
}