Banz Elcong Primary School take take lead

By Mal Taime

BANZ Elcong Primary School in North Wahgi district may be the first school for taking the initiative to introduce internal examination for the students to become more productive.

The school is taking a new step ahead of other primary schools in Jiwaka, Highlands region and the country as a whole to introduce the internal examinations for students ranging from Grades 3-7, will sit for examinations on week eight.

 The new idea was introduced to put the students mind and performance to test to find out their weakness meaning that they have been doing well throughout the academic year or not.

 Most schools follow normal schooling year calendar by not creating something new for the students, therefore those students that are dull continues to become dull while those that are clever continue to be clever.

It is very good for Banz Elcong Primary School to introduce internal examination program to test the students performance if they score the set cut off mark they will continue to do another grade or if they do not perform they will remain to repeat the same grade.

The school is situated near Lutheran Collage at Dumbola but students come as far as Tolu, Kongambil, Wahgi Valley and Banz bypassing nearby schools to attend because it had story of producing quality students and they want to follow the same footpath.

The school has set a track record of producing quality students and now with the new internal examination program introduced it will play a major role to boost the morale of both the staffs and students because it is a very significant program and will become an ongoing one.

It is believed that the school secretly want to compete with other primary schools throughout Jiwaka Province because the new province is lacking with resources and aimed at banking on human resource heavily so it wanted to make sure all of its students are taught properly so that in future they will have an opportunity of fitting into a better position to run the affairs of Jiwaka Province.

Banz Elcong Primary School has a good record of teaching the students properly because the teaching staffs are very committed and they must be credited for their time and effort in the classrooms

Also the new internal examinations introduce will do grading for the staffs because the onus will be with the teachers to identify and separate weak students from bright students so that they (students) will remain to repeat the same grade.

The school board pledged that teachers that will be engaged to teach the weak students will be given incentives and this will make the staffs compete among each other.

This program means that it will not push out the students like education system does but it will make sure the students performance is very good.

Banz Elcong Primary School was established in early 1954 by the first missionary from Germany that explored Jiwaka Province with bush materials because there was a need.
After that they slowly replaced it with permanent buildings and now only five pioneer buildings are remaining and the school continues to maintain it.

The board and staffs had worked hard to build infrastructure building for the school and at the same time they wanted to make sure the students learning performance improve therefore the agreed to provide incentives for teachers so that they will commit themselves to teach the weak students because according to the ability the school wants to concentrate more on weak students.

The school is not looking at the sizes of the students but is seriously looking into the students knowledge and this is what most parents and people want for.

Deputy Head Teacher Bubiang Teine and Elizabeth Wan are working extra hard to coordinate the assessment because it will also put to the teachers to test because they will be also graded and elevated to another level so each teacher has been tasked to write policies and once it is completed they will compile it together and put into examination book.

The students will sit for the exam to formulate what lesson they learnt in classroom throughout the academic year.

Despite experiencing problem with high enrolment figure because of the free education scheme the school continue to maintain the same record to cater for every students and is developing infrastructure building with limited resources it collected from the project fees and the government free education subsidy scheme.

All the staffs at the school took up their post in 2003 and with their sweat under the administration of Head Teacher Paul Kundi they built five new buildings including an administration building and named it Kundi administration.

The administration building alone cost them K150, 000 which took the school three solid years to complete without any help from the government.

The school has 23 staffs with 957 students and this is another contributing factor to the school because of no proper funding for infrastructure building in plan to cater for the students.

The school motto is “strive for success through prayer, study, work and play”.
They have 14 computers and TV program for the students but due to shortage of building the students are not getting TV lesson with computing.
Banz Elcong is also a sister school to Tatachilla Lutheran College in Australia it made possible for them to seek some help such as computers and multipurpose photocopy machine that help to reduce some school works.

There are still many problems the school is facing but despite that it has put together a five year plan but is still lacking with funding.