Mbale High School, one of the Christian based and oldest traditional schools in Masabaland which is found Northern City division,Mbale city in the eastern region , is facing a shortage of classrooms amid high enrollment of students.
The headmaster. Mr Stephen Wambalo , told this Publication that the school with a population of 6554 has a deficit of 25 classrooms. "The school faces a big challenge of classroom inadequacy to cater for this population explosion. The school requires 40 classrooms but currently has only 15 classrooms, giving a deficit of 25 classrooms," Wambalo said.
Due to the continued lack of infrastructure, the administration of the school has since turned a grounded school bus and tree shades into classrooms for students.
Mr Wambalo said the Ministry of Education had earlier pledged to construct more classrooms, an administrative block, a multi-purpose hall, a science laboratory, a library, teachers' quarters, and pit-latrines but this hasn't been implemented.
"The classrooms have rugged floors, very dusty, leaking roofs, and poor furniture. The situation makes learning very difficult," he said.Wambalo said the school also requires at most ten dormitories and Canteen.
"There is need for Recruitment of more teachers because currently the staff is limited. This is the dilemma we are in now but school is supposed to have over 100 teachers so that to accommodate all the learners but currently we have 90." he said.
The school which sits on 2.5 acres of land, has no staff quarters, the teacher-student ratio stands at 1:200, which is too big for effective learning and the classroom-student ratio also stands at the same.
Wambalo added that under the Universal Secondary Education (USE) programme, the school receives Shs100m but it is supposed to get Shs300m per term. He said the school faces another challenge of water shortage. "The school spends about Shs600,000 per week and Shs2.4m per month on buying water, which is too costly for the school," Mr Wambalo said.
Academic performance Mr Wambalo said in terms of academic performance, the school has highly improved, saying last year 2025, they registered over 700 students in Division One for ordinary level “O”level , while in Advanced level,50 students scored got 18 points and 350 attained at least principal pass that qualifies them join high institutions of learning.
The Bugisu Cultural Institution spokesperson and an academician in the region, Steven Masiga, revealed that So many outstanding people have gone through this school and we call upon the government to rescue the school in infrastructure development."
Masiga added that there is a need to support the government schools to improve academic performance. "We are glad that the government through the ministry of education and sports have plans to support different schools in the region but Mbale high school should be among one of the prioritizes because it is one of the old traditional schools in this region," Masiga stressed.
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