Supreme Special: School Plant Management and Maintenance

Whenever school management is mentioned, the things that comes to mind are the basically and by extension none-teachers (Personnel), Students and money. The school facilities like the buildings, environment, equipment are hardly ever mentioned or not mentioned at all. Reasons being that they are on ground already, hence ignored. School plant management is a very important part of the overall management of the entire school system, because if the school facilities are properly and effectively managed it will in turn positively translate into students and personnel welfare.

What is School plant? - The school plant is not different from the physical infrastructure in a school environment, it's site and land scape. Infrastructure basically entails buildings and equipment; the site gives a picture of how conducive is the environment for teaching and learning while the landscape gives an esthetical expression of the school. There must be a good mix of the aforementioned factors for a good school plant.

What is maintenance? It involves those activities which are concerned with keeping grounds, buildings and equipment at their original condition of completeness of efficiency, either through repairs or by replacements."

The task involved in changing the existing poor or negative school plant maintenance culture in our public schools is not an easy one. Initiating and developing positive school maintenance culture in the schools requires the cooperation and joint efforts of school administrators, educational policy makers, school staff and students as well as other stakeholders in education.

What then should be done to initiate, promote and sustain a positive school plant /facility maintenance culture? - There has to be conscious commitment by the

school managers, teachers and students to establislish a facility maintain programe through:

• Assigning the responsibility for the care of school flower hedges, school grounds, lawns and other structures in the school to specific classes, under the supervision of either the class captains or their class teachers. In order to develop a caring culture, the students should have something to take care of.

• Introduce strict punitive measures against erring students who may either refuse to adhere to the school rules on maintenance like destroying school properties, drawing or writing on school walls without permission to do so etc or refuse to carry out school maintenance responsibilities assigned them.

• Snap checks by the head teacher or assistant on Classrooms, Laboratories, Hostels if any, toilets. This is just to ensure that all those assigned responsibilities are diligently carrying out their duties

• Rewarding students who are drivers of the school maintenance programme initiated by the head teacher.

By default, if a clean environment is a healthy environment; then a well maintained school plant must enable sound teaching and learning environment.

Krystal IBHADE Tamunosiki ([email protected]).