Head teacher’s approach awoke sleeping rural school

By Lydiah Nyawira

Nyeri, Kenya: It is easy to dismiss a rural day school’s ability to succeed in national examinations. However, District Education Board (DEB) Karaguririo Primary School in Mukurweini, Nyeri County, has slowly clawed its way to the height of academic excellence.

In last year’s Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) exam results, 15 out of the 63 candidates secured places in national schools while 56 had 349 marks and above, out of a possible 500 marks. The school was ranked the top public day school in Nyeri County and third overall.

Now everyone wants to enrol their children in the school, which has minimal facilities compared to private schools. In 2008, the school managed to get only two students into a county school and was ranked 68 out of 70 in Mukurweini Sub-county.

This poor performance changed when Charles Mwangi Waweru was posted to head the school that year.

“We brought the parents on board and counselled them to take a keen interest in their children’s education. We set targets and insisted on punctuality for the students. In a day school, time management is important,” Mr Waweru says. However, he soon noted that the pupils’ mind-set was wrong. So the school management team organised for them to visit national schools in the county as well as the Dedan Kimathi University of Technology just to open up their minds and allow them to dream of possibilities.

“Interacting with the students in these facilities opened up the pupils’ minds and fuelled their ambition to succeed,” says Waweru.

The teachers also starting paying attention to individual students’ needs. It has now become a tradition that former students of the school admitted to national and county schools return to the school during the holidays to mentor and tutor national exam candidates, motivating them to succeed and join them in secondary schools of choice.

“It’s not hard to help a child succeed once they are motivated and ambitious, each seeking their own goals to attain in the national exams,” explains Waweru.

As the school flies to higher heights, there are various challenges pulling it down.

“The number of students enrolled has significantly increased since our academic standards improved — from 230 students in 2008 to the current 503 and an additional 133 in our early childhood centre.”

Waweru says this has strained facilities as the sanitation and classes cannot accommodate that many students — and the number of teachers has remained at only nine.

Parents we talked to were optimistic that the school would excel this year, and perform even better than last year.