The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has issued show course letters to more than 200 secondary school headteachers and principals for failing to adhere to the reduced fee structure.
According to an agreement reached between parents and the Ministry of Education, students in national schools are required to pay school fees of Ksh45,000 instead of Ksh54,000.
Those in the county and extra county schools are to pay Ksh35,000.
The agreement was reached as a way to reduce the burden on parents following a condensed education calendar in a bid to recover lost time following the closure of schools due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
But according to the National Parent Association (NPA) chairperson Nicholas Maiyo, school heads and principals in at least 210 schools were still charging more than the estimated figure.
“The biggest problem is that there are so many schools that charge higher school fees than the one recommended by the Ministry of Education,” says Maiyo.
He notes that some school heads are hiding on to the extra levies to charge more school fees to parents.
“Most of the headteachers give names to the extra levies as activity fees, motivational money or remedial which are basically extra levies not approved,” noted the parents’ association chairperson.
The headteachers that have received the show course letters now risk being sacked or getting suspended.
Maiyo is now asking any parent who is still paying the same amount of fees as it was before the Covid-19 pandemic to reach out to them for appropriate action to be taken against them.
The reduced fee structure stays in force until the education calendar will be back to normal.
Currently, there are four terms in a year, rather than the normal three, as the government works to recover time lost when schools were closed for about a year at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
