How CSSPS Mess At St. Mary’s Created Room For Protocol Admissions

With the dust still settling on this year’s messy placement of Basic School graduates into the various Senior High Schools across the country through the Computer Placement and School Selection System (CSSPS) a July 2018 letter has popped up showing how protocol admissions were used to counterbalance messy placements in St. Mary’s Technical/Vocational Institute in the Eastern region.

The letter, written by the Principal of the School, Rev. Sr. Elizabeth Biga, and addressed to the Director of Secondary Education Unit of the Ghana Education Service, lamented that even though St. Mary’s was a mix-accommodating school, only day students had been posted to the school.

The placement had left the school’s boarding facilities redundant making the principal write to the Secondary Education Unit for rectification.

According to the letter sighted by WhatsUp News, the Secondary Education Unit had rectified the misplacement by making protocol placements at the school to fill up the boarding houses.

“Upon reporting the issue to your office, you took a swift action and the subsequent approved protocol students were given a boarding status,” Rev. Sr. Biga had written.

The letter reaffirms accusations that the reason CSSPS placements have become so messy under the Akufo-Addo government is that the government introduced protocol placements which originally is not supposed to be part of the programming of the computers that place students.

The protocol placements disrupt the binary codes of the computers and lead to misplacements. Highlights of this year’s misplacements included the posting of boys to single sex female schools and the posting of girls to single sex male schools.

Also, some students who had made grade 6 could not find schools while some who had made grade 35 had been placed in schools to read science.

Attempts by parents and students to rectify in Accra led to a near stampede with parents and students collapsing at the Black Star Square from apparent sun stroke. Education Minister, Mathew Opoku Prempeh had responded to the faintings with claims that the parents and students who had collapsed had been paid money by government detractors to act out the fainti9ngs just to embarrass government.