Mega school concept is to protect the poor –Mimiko

Ondo State Governor, Olusegun Mimiko, says the need to rescue the poor from exorbitant tuition prompted his administration to inaugurate the Caring Heart Mega School initiative.

The governor told journalists in Akure on Thursday that before 2009, only a small percentage of the public school pupils made it to good tertiary institutions.

He said, “We quickly realised that in this uneven kind of competition with private schools, the public schools system, either at the primary or secondary education tier, produced students invariably from poor homes, who never made it to any tertiary institution because of the manifest deficiency in their scholarship.

“The effect of this inherently discriminatory system is that qualitative but free primary and secondary education in the state became only a mental construct and catchy political sloganeering because in practice, only the rich could afford it.

“To rectify this imbalance from source and expose the children of the less privileged to good education just like the children of the elites, the government started building model primary schools, appropriately named Caring Heart Mega Schools to reflect the scope of learning possibilities and the sheer capacity for students’ intake.”

Mimiko added that the mega school concept was the government’s way of making available the best of education in the state’s public schools system.

The governor added, “Aesthetically pleasing to the eye, functionally built to be 21st-Century digitally compliant centres of learning, the mega schools, among many departures from the past, can accommodate 1,050 pupils for the Type-I, 525 pupils for the Type-II, and 225 pupils for Type-III.

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