About 200 school children absent themselves from school daily to engage in all manner of jobs at illegal mining (galamsey) sites in the Asutifi District, Mr. George Amanor-Kyeremeh, the District Director of Education, said at a one day education forum at Kenyasi.
He said the negative impact of illegal mining operations on education, especially at the primary and junior high school levels in the district, had become alarming.
"The number (of schoolchildren) who engages in this activity during weekends and vacations on daily basis can be described as uncountable."
"As result of this trend, within the last two academic years 14 girls became truants whilst 21 were impregnated and dropped out of school in various towns in the district", Mr. Amanor-Kyeremeh said.
The forum, organized and sponsored by Actionaid, an international human rights and educational non-governmental organization, was under the theme "Galamsey - A misplaced priority for school children".
It was a platform for stakeholders to discuss and take concrete decisions in addressing the escalating involvement of school children in illegal mining activities and to encourage them to take education more serious.
Mr. Amanor-Kyeremeh said illegal mining is now a 24-hour activity and had given rise to all forms of ancillary commercial and economic engagements.
These include chop bar operation, hard drugs dealing, hawking, iced-water selling, liquor/alcoholic beverages, kerosene and virtually the sale of every essential commodity day and night.
He described the situation as "frightening" and posed a bleak future for education development and human resource capacity of the district.
Mr. Amanor-Kyeremeh expressed regret that some of the women traders even take along their children as young as class one pupils to serve as baby sitters while they engage in their businesses.
He said before the school children were hired or employed as errand or "ghetto boys" by the ghetto owners and agents, "some of them are introduced to Indian hemp smoking, whilst others are given 'laka' (mixture of cocaine and akpeteshie - a locally brewed hard liquor)to drink".
The 'ghetto' is a parcel or portion of land that an operator has acquired and earmarked for the illegal mining activity.
The essence of this sort of life-threatening baptism, he said, is to strengthen and harden them physically because of the energy sapping nature of the galamsey operation.
Mr. Amanor-Kyeremeh said the children make a lot of money that they exhibit through the acquisition of flashy and expensive camera mobile phones in school and come to school with large sums of money in their pockets.
Mr. Amanor-Kyeremeh said the situation had consequently bred indiscipline among the schoolchildren who flagrantly show disrespect to teachers, refusal to do prescribed punishments, open defiance to authority and frequent fisticuffs amongst them.
Other key issues are promiscuity and attendant problems of HIV/AIDS, use of school premises as brothels by the illegal miners.
He cited Krapoo Methodist Primary and Nkaseim Redeemer and Methodist primaries as some of the schools used as brothels.
He urged the District Health Directorate to come out with reproductive health management strategies "because unsafe abortion by even primary school girls has been on the increase".
Mr. Amanor-Kyeremeh said other resultant effects were the installation of crushing machines near school lands and the use of some school premises as thoroughfares by the illegal miners on motorbikes as their operational areas are inaccessible to vehicles.
He appealed to parents, guardians and other stakeholders to take responsibility in finding a lasting solution to the problem and suggested the legalization of illegal mining in the area as in other places.
"This will bring the operators together and register them to form partnerships to bring sanity into their operations", he said.
Mr. Paul Okoh, Member of Parliament for Asutifi North, appealed to parents and guardians to discard the notion that education was timeless and had no end, stressing that was wrong because memory faded with time.
"Now is the time for the children to be motivated and encouraged to take interest in education as investment for their future well-being and that will depend on the right supervision and effective control that parents and guardians will exercise on their children and wards."
Mr. Okoh urged district assemblies to enact by-laws not only to prohibit children from engaging in galamsey and other forms of menial jobs but also to prosecute parents who shirked their responsibilities as well as others found to be engaging them in their businesses.