Form Four leavers go with huge fee arrears

Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) 2023 candidates at Meru School have left the institution grappling with debts due to millions of monies they owe through fees balance.

Even as Principal Rutere Mwenda led his teaching and non-teaching staff in celebrating the stellar performance by the 414 boys who sat the examination, he decried fees arrears left behind by the students, saying chances of recovering the monies were minimal.

He attributed this to the fact that the majority of students are from vulnerable families who had not been able to settle fee arrears running into over Sh20 million for the last three years.

“The 2023 class alone left arrears totalling Sh5.7 million. Even if we were to recover this, we cannot get more than 10 per cent of it and this tells you how we end up struggling with debts since the expenses have already been incurred by the students,” Mwenda explained.

Operational costs

He said the arrears had put the institution in a difficult financial position, with 2,200 students to feed, among other operational costs.

But he said the school has devised internal ways of survival including an alumni that contributes money to pay school fees for the neediest students.

“We have always had a way of getting out of the woods but this compromises things like development projects or repairs in the institution,” said Mwenda.

Once the examination is done, he added, it becomes very difficult to get the arrears paid since the contract is between the student and Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) and the fact that the Ministry of Education requires us to release students’ results slips once the examination results are out.

We try to survive in one way or another. We have the alumni who try to assist us and other small income-generating projects that help us raise fees so that we do not end up sending any students home. One of the boys who got A plain, we had to go for him from a day school because he had dropped (from Meru School) and he ended up doing very well here,” he said.