Revitalizing the Management Practices of Public Senior Secondary Schools in South-East Senatorial District for Sustainable Development in Rivers State

Abstract

The design adopted for the study was descriptive survey design and the population comprised of 52 principals from the 52 public senior secondary schools in the district, with distribution across various local government areas, including Andoni, Eleme, Gokana, Khana, Opobo-Nkoro, Oyigbo, and Tai. The census sampling technique was employed, where all 52 principals from the 52 public senior secondary schools were selected for the study. A 21 self -structured questionnaire titled “Revitalizing the Management Practices of Schools for Sustainable Development Questionnaire” (RMPSSDQ), was employed to gather data. The questionnaire adopted a 4- point Likert rating scale rating. The instrument was duly validated by experts and a reliability index of 0.84 was established using Cronbach alpha. A criterion Mean of 2.50 was used as a cut-off mark while mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions. A t- test inferential statistics was used in testing all null hypotheses at 0.05 level significance. Statistical analysis was done using the statistical package for social science, SPSS version 23. Findings from the study revealed that unified structure of leadership, lack of capacity building for staff, inadequate resource allocation, weak monitoring and evaluation, and none involvement of educational stakeholders in schools were the management practices. Inadequate infrastructure, poor leadership styles, dearth of funds, lack of support from the government and lack of skilled manpower were the challenges of managing schools while lack of capacity building programme for staff, inadequate resource allocation, low stakeholder participation, weak monitoring and evaluation, unified leadership structure and so on should be revitalized. The study recommended amongst all others that the challenges affecting the management in schools in South-East Senatorial District of Rivers State should be identified and looked into and that heads of secondary schools should be trained and retrained on proficiency development.