Innovative strategies employed by school managers to supplement finances and create sustainability of secondary school finances in Kitui Central District, Kitui County, Kenya.

Abstract

The increasing cost of secondary education and its implications on retention and completion rates continue to be of great concern to school managers in Kenya. Despite continued disbursement of funds by government to secondary schools and schools raising funds from their traditional sources, these have been inadequate, hence the need for secondary schools to carry out innovative strategies to raise additional funds. The Kenyan government has been encouraging schools to come up with income generating projects to raise additional funds though how much this has been carried out is not clear. This study sought to analyse the innovative approaches being applied by school managers to supplement secondary school finances in Kitui Central District of Kitui County and create sustainability in secondary school finances. The study was guided by the following objectives: to analyse the innovative strategies being employed to generate additional funds for secondary schools in Kitui Central; to assess the barriers to innovativeness in initiation and management of school projects for income generation in secondary schools in Kitui Central District and to devise appropriate strategies to overcome barriers that face school managers in carrying out innovative approaches to generate additional funds in secondary schools in Kitui Central District, to evaluate the contribution of innovative strategies applied by school managers in creating sustainable financing of public secondary education in Kitui Central District. The study was guided by the cost effectiveness model by Alkin (1970). The study adopted descriptive research design targeting all the principals, deputy principals, Board of Management and school account clerks/bursar/accountants in the 34 secondary schools in Kitui Central District. Stratified sampling, random sampling and purposive sampling techniques were used to select twelve schools from the thirty four schools to represent the sampling units. From each unit/school a principal, a deputy and the bursar/accounts clerks and five BOM members were selected yielding a sample size of 96 respondents. Data from Principals, Deputy Principals and accounts clerks/bursars was collected using questionnaires while interview schedules were used to collect data from BoM members. An observation check list was among the data collection tools used. The collected data was validated with the assistance of supervisor and the department of education at Mt. Kenya University while reliability was determined through the use of test retest procedure. Data collected was both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative data was analysed thematically by categorizing the data into themes in relation to opinions, views and perception of the respondents while quantitative data collected was coded and entered into an SPSS programme for analysis and presented in form of frequency distribution, mean, standard deviations and percentages. The study established that the main income generating activities in schools in Kitui Central were running of school canteen, agriculture and hiring of school facilities and that the managers lacked capita, managerial skills, technical knowhow and lacked community support. The study recommended that the ministry of education should carry out training programmes in enterpreneural skills to the school managers in Kitui Central, regularly monitoring and auditing of school income generating activities should be done and a partnership developed between the school managers, the support staff and the local community to enhance transparency and ownership.