A group of teachers, said to be numbering around sixty, has chased the headmistress of Gowrie Senior High/Technical School, Elizabeth Zinye Paaga, out of her office.
The action prompted wild jubilation among a crowd of students in front of the administration block on Tuesday, 22 July 2025.
At present, red ribbon-sized pieces of cloth are tied to the block, signifying protests, and the building has been secured with extra locks, preventing the ousted headmistress from entering it.
The head of the school’s technical department, Roland Awine Adabre, told Media Without Borders the action started brewing way back in January, this year, when heads of departments demanded the school’s analysis of the 2024 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results.
According to Adabre, she declined to release the analysis as the heads of departments continued making the request.
While a staff general meeting was underway on Monday, 21 July 2025, she reportedly made some offensive remarks against some teachers over the demand for the analysis and walked out on the meeting as tension built.
The first and second-year students were due to start sitting their School-Based Assessment (SBA) on Tuesday morning but there were no A4 sheets to print the questions. The sheets, which were supposed to be in the school’s stores, were locked away in the headmistress’s office.
It was already some minutes past eight when the headmistress arrived. And when some senior members of the teaching staff approached her for the A4 sheets, she reportedly asked them to go back and count the number of sheets needed for the assessment.
The teachers left and returned to the office minutes later, not with the answer she demanded but with a demand that she leave the office with immediate effect.
She fought back, saying with a firm tone that she was going nowhere. But when the number of the incensed teachers increased and their demand loudened into a crescendo, she picked up her bag and walked out of the office.
As she left the premises, she also declared that the teachers would regret their action. But the teachers did not seem to pay attention to what she said.
Their attention was rather on the spontaneous outburst of celebration and excitement that greeted her unexpected departure among a crowd of students publicly jubilating as though an unpopular military ruler had been overthrown.
“We don’t want her! We don’t want her! We don’t want her!” the students chorused deafeningly and repeatedly.
The students should have been busy answering their school-based assessment questions at the time of the jubilation.
More accusations
The aforementioned issues were not the only reasons the teachers sacked their boss from her own office on Tuesday.
According to the school’s staff secretary and leader of the staff protests, Maclean Ayamga, the headmistress and the school’s matron also had questions to answer about some missing food items meant for the boarding students but which had been found in a room not officially designated as a food store.
Ayamga says there is not a single drop of cooking oil in the school but drums of cooking oil, bags of rice, canned fish and other food items are being hoarded inside that room while the school buys oil and the students starve. The room in question has been secured with new locks to ensure “the evidence” in it remains intact.
Three weeks ago, a pregnant student was suspected to have either undertaken an abortion or had a miscarriage on campus. The teachers are mad at the headmistress because she unilaterally invited the girl’s parents to the school for a discussion and handed the student indefinite suspension from the school.
The teachers contend that such decisions are not taken alone by an individual at the school level and that she has no authority to place a student on indefinite suspension. They also slammed her for rushing into such an action without first ascertaining, with the aid of health professionals, whether the pregnancy was terminated by an abortion or a miscarriage for a better judgment of the matter.
Ayamga also made reference to a white paper released following a report compiled by a committee tasked to unearth the reasons behind a riot that rocked the school in May, 2021.
He said the students were fined an amount of money each for the repairs of the teachers’ belongings vandalised during the riot, according to the white paper. He asserted that the teachers who prefunded the repairs were expected to be reimbursed after the students had paid the fines but none had received a refund despite a great number of students having paid the penalties.
“She insults us like five-year-olds,” Ayamga added. “And for the past six months, she has not worked with the senior housemaster. She says he does not do what she feels is right.”
Three officials from the Upper East Regional Education Directorate visited the school on Tuesday on behalf of the regional director of education, Alice Ellen Abeere-Inga, who is reported to be out of the region.
The delegation, led by a human resource manager at the regional education directorate, Francis Ndego, entreated the teachers to allow peace to prevail and academic work to continue on the campus.
Copies of a petition penned by the teachers have been in circulation since Tuesday. The headmistress did not respond to a request from this author for her comment on the petition before press time.
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org/Ghana
