The Preparedness of School Related Facilities for Students Enrolment in Public Secondary Schools in Rivers State

The notion of unpreparedness of facilities to accommodate school enrolment by school owners motivated this study. The study examined the level of school facilities preparedness for students’ enrolment in public secondary schools in Rivers State. The simple random sampling technique was adopted that comprised one hundred and thirty-three school principals (133) representing 50% of the entire number of the schools. The checklist instrument was used for data collection in assessing available facilities to accommodate the number of students enrolled in a school. Thus, a self-structured checklist titled “Availability of School Facilities Checklist†(ASFC) weighing dichotomous response options of “Available (A) and Not Available (NA)†was applied. A content validity questionnaire was instituted by the two experts at the University of Port Harcourt. The Kuder-Richardson was used to establish the reliability of the questionnaire. Thereafter, a reliability co-efficient index of 88% was revealed. The results show a high extent of a limited supply of school facilities such as classrooms, laboratories, libraries, etc. for students’ enrolment in public secondary schools in Rivers State. Further, the findings indicated an overall percentage score of 78.6% and 77.0% unavailability of learning facilities in urban and rural schools. Also, the study shows both urban and rural schools have football fields with 100% availability, while basketball court, tennis court, pavilion, and multi-purpose games hall are seldom available in all locations. The study, therefore, recommended Rivers State government as a sole financier of public institutions to urgently provide schools with learning and sporting facilities to accommodate students’ enrolments.