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The Demonstration School for the Deaf (DEMODEAF) at Mampong Akuapem in the Eastern Region will need to expand its facilities in order to take more students when school re-opens.

It said due to inadequate space, the school occasionally had to turn back prospective students.

“Our school is the first school for the deaf and so the school is well known and parents try to bring their children here. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough space and so every term or every academic year, we send between 20 to 30 per cent of children away to other schools because of the lack of space,” the outgoing headmaster of the school, Mr Abraham Yemoson, told the Daily Graphic recently during a fumigation exercise by Zoomlion Ghana Limited.

Population

The Demonstration School for the Deaf which has 460 students offers programmes such as leather works, hairdressing, sewing and beads making at the vocational level.

It has a kindergarten, primary, junior high school and vocational programmes.

Mr Yemoson said projects were being undertaken that were yet to be completed.

Moreover, he noted that the classrooms too were smaller with large numbers of students, thereby making teaching difficult since most of the children would not be able to see the teaching using sign language.

Class size

He said the ideal number of students that should be in a class should be about 10 or maximum 15 “so that you can teach them well because if you don’t see them and they don’t see you, teaching will be difficult because of the use of signs”.

In some classes, he said, for instance, the number of students was 24, 26 and 36, too large because of the special situation of the students.

Mr Yemoson said the school had secured some flat screens which would be used to project the lessons for the students to attract their attention and for the teachers to sign less, adding that had been done at the junior high school block and would be extended to the primary block.

Parents

The headmaster advised parents who had their children in the school to take their studies seriously since anytime school re-opened it took some of them (parents) over a month to send their children to school.

He said the children were special since some of them ended up at the college of education, universities, and came back to teach in the school.

Such teachers, he said, served as role models and so parents needed to take the education of the children very seriously.

Mr Yemoson said before the students were sent away due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in the country, they and the staff were taken through the safety protocols, including the washing of hands under running water, the use of hand sanitiser, maintaining social distance and coughing into the elbow.

That, he said, would be repeated once the students returned when the COVID-19 issue had been addressed.