Buchanan City – Ahead of the 2019/2020 academic school year, the president of the Grand Bassa Community College (GBCC) Dr. Samuel K. Monwell has expressed fear of losing some instructors if the harmonization policy is not properly implemented.
Dr. Monwell warned that the county premier learning institution risks losing some of its teaching staff and the situation may likely extend to other tertiary learning institutions.
“If this harmonization continues and the tertiary education is not allowed to make their own decisions, we will have some of the community colleges losing professors,” he said.
“What we have done as consortium of community colleges, we have met many times. We’ve talked met with the head of the harmonization process. We met at the Ministry of Finance and told them that, tertiary education may perhaps have a different dynamism so you have to be careful.”
Dr. Monwell said the implementation of the scheme should be done in consultation with the college administration.
“You don’t tell us how much to be paid. We will come up with a format and tell you because we have professors, assistant professors. And we do have people working on a semester basis, so to determine their pay from up there will not be good, so we were thinking about having a dialogue,” he said.
The policy was introduced by the government and is expected to affect 9,000 civil servants.
Meanwhile, Dr. Monwell said for the past three months the college has not received support for its operations.
“One of the hurdles that most of the community colleges encounter in this place is how you do your operations. For the past two to three months, most of the community colleges have not been able to benefit from the goods and services,” he said.
“So, we hope that the goods and services will come because in the absent of the goods and services, how do we I buy my chalk, how do I buy stationery even as school is about to open. So, this is one of the areas that we really been thinking that the government should give priority.”
Also commenting on the budget, Dr. Monwell said the allotment for the college in the 2019/2020 does not commensurate with the college operational needs.
He called for “reasonable” increment in the college to commensurate with the learning activities of the over 1,000 students.
“I hope that the county officials and the budget people will hear and that they will speak to that. It needs to be increased to a help the almost 2,000 students on campus,” he said.