MONROVIA – According to an unconfirmed report reaching FrontPage Africa, the Ministry of Education has ordered a suspension of academic activities at New Totota Public School after a photo showing students seated on bare ground Monday circulated widely on social media.
By Selma Lomax, [email protected] | Bong County, Liberia
Neither the Ministry nor the Bong County School System has publicly confirmed the suspension, explained the decision, or given a timeline for when classes might resume. This story is developing, and details will be updated as they are confirmed.
A Problem Everyone Could See, Long Before Facebook Did
New Totota Public School — one of three public schools in the town, located in Salala District — has spent years without a finished building to call its own. More than 357 students have attended classes inside the local Assembly of God Church, some seated on borrowed pews, others on the bare floor for lack of anywhere else to sit.
Construction materials, including roofing zinc and lumber, were delivered to the site long ago, but the building itself was never completed. School administrators had repeatedly appealed publicly for help — to government, to philanthropists, to former students and well-wishers — hoping to finish the structure before the pressure of another academic term arrived.
None of that, on its own, prompted intervention from the Ministry of Education. The school continued operating in the church, under conditions that were widely known within the community and openly discussed in the administration’s own funding appeals.
The Image That Changed Everything — Just Not in the Way Residents Hoped
What altered the situation, according to reports reaching FrontPagfe Africa, wasn’t new information. It was exposure. Once a photo of children learning on bare ground began spreading on Facebook, national and local education officials reportedly found themselves tagged and criticized directly in connection with the school’s unfinished state.
Shortly afterward, rather than moving to address the underlying construction shortfall, the Ministry is reported to have ordered the school shut down entirely. Members of the Parent-Teacher Association have reportedly been summoned to a meeting with education authorities, with the resumption of classes said to depend on its outcome.
For a community that had lived with the same conditions for years without any such response, the sequence has raised an uncomfortable question about why was the shutdown about protecting children, or about managing the fallout from a bad news cycle?
A Response to Embarrassment, Not to the Problem Itself
The contrast has not gone unnoticed locally. The building’s incomplete state, the makeshift church classrooms, and the children seated on the ground were not secrets — they were the subject of the school’s own public appeals for support. Yet it took public visibility and direct criticism of officials, rather than the conditions themselves, to produce a Ministry response. And that response was a shutdown, not the funding or construction support the community had been requesting all along.
That distinction matters to parents who had already enrolled their children for the 2026/2027 academic year, only to now face a closure with no confirmed reason and no announced date for reopening.
A Lawmaker Pushes Back on the Narrative
Salala District’s representative, Moima Briggs-Mensah, weighed in on the unfolding controversy, urging caution about how the story is being framed and reported. She said it is unfortunate that some media houses report only what they observe without conducting proper fact-finding or seeking the fuller truth.
She stressed that children’s education is too important to be used as a political weapon, and that their future must never become a platform for political games, personal interests, or sensationalized coverage. She called on leaders to protect children’s welfare and education by focusing on facts and solutions rather than politics, warning that the stakes for the children involved are too high to fail them.
Her remarks add another layer to a story already defined by contradiction even as she cautions against politicizing the issue, new images confirm that students in New Totota are still sitting on bare ground to learn in the current academic year — the very condition that triggered the controversy in the first place.
What’s Still Missing: Answers
As it stands, neither the Ministry of Education nor the Bong County School System has issued an official statement confirming the suspension, clarifying its rationale, or setting a date for resumption. What remains undisputed is the reality that sparked the viral post to begin with an unfinished school building, materials sitting unused, and hundreds of children whose education now hangs on a resolution with no timeline in sight.
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