A History of the St. Anthony Roman Catholic School, Ejisu, Ashanti, Ghana

The now 90-years old St. Anthony Roman Catholic School in the Ashanti Region of Ghana, originated as a primary school at Adadientem, a village in the Ejisu Municipality around 1930. When the Parish Priest in charge of the Diocese of Konongo, Ashanti Region, found that there was no commitment to the school from the church elders, he moved the school to Ejisu, and a new six-year primary school was born. Nana Kwabena Owusu, the then paramount chief of the Ejisu Traditional area laid the foundation stone in 1933.

The school did not initially have a middle school, so after finishing the six years of primary education the pupils went either to the St. Peter’s Middle School Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti Region, or a similar school in Konongo to complete their 10-year elementary education. The St. Anthony Roman Catholic School attained middle school status in 1941. In 1945, the first batch of 27 pupils took the Middle School Leaving Certificate Examination at the Effiduase Examination Centre, approximately 15 miles from Ejisu.

The early administration and faculty of the school included Mr. Williams, Mr. Twumasi, Mr. Thomas Kwaku (T.K.) Mensah, Mr. Arthur and Mr. Robert Alexander Osei.

The school has continued to develop tremendously and kept pace with all the different stages of education in Ghana. In 1986 the middle school was converted to Junior High School (JHS) and ran concurrently with the middle school until the middle school was phased out in the 1989-90 academic year. It added a nursery school –pre-K and Kindergarten- in 1997. Today, the school consists of Pre-K through Junior High/Secondary School (9th Grade)

There have been several structural developments at the school; for example,

Through a grant from a philanthropic organization in Spain, Minos Unidas, a two-level building was added to the school in 2004. The rooms are currently being used by the primary and junior high schools.

In 2008, Boston College (BC) in Boston, MA, USA, represented by Prof. Dr. Kwasi Sarkodie-Mensah and Mr. Timothy Anderson, a BC alumnus, and founder of World Computer Exchange, provided a set of computers for the first computer lab in the school. There are no longer functional computers in the lab, except for the one work station provided by the Ghana Education Service for records and data keeping.

In 2017, Mr. Ole Knutzen, a member of the Rotary Club of Copenhagen, Denmark, sent money through the Rotary Club of Kumasi East for the construction of a mechanized well to provide potable water for the school and the surrounding neighborhood. Mr. Kwame Kyeremateng Mensah-Aborampah was president of the Rotary Club of Kumasi East at that time.

The population of the school has grown from 27 to close to 1000 pupils, over the past 90 years.

Ejisu R/C has educated a plethora of people who are now using their gifts and talents in Ghana and around the world: engineers, teachers, priests, nurses, medical doctors, business men and women, hotel proprietors, lawyers, masons, electricians, plumbers, university professors, principal secretaries, carpenters, market sellers, architects, accountants, etc.

In recent years, access to adequate washroom facilities has been a challenge for the members of the school community. Pupils currently depend on nearby paid facilities and neighborhood houses to use bathroom facilities, a process that takes valuable time away from their schoolwork on any typical school day.

The current Antwi Mensah and Family Foundation (AMAFF) project will make a tremendously unique difference. Members of the school community will for the first time in many years have a local facility where they can use state of the art toilet facilities during the time they are in school and concentrate on their studies and social development instead of scouting around for such facilities as has been the case for many years now.