Rotting plank falls and injures State College student

By Martina Johnson
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Students at the Antigua State College are crying out for urgent attention to be given to repairing the institution after a rotten plank fell on one of their classmates yesterday.
The accident resulted in a 16-year-old student being hospitalised due to the severe head pain she was feeling up to last night.
One witness who was in an integrated math class at 2:30 p.m. when the incident occurred said, “The rotten piece of the partition fell and hit her on the back of her head…she fell forward and hit the front of her head on the desk.”
The teenaged student allegedly blacked out for a brief period, and her classmates rushed to help her as well as a teacher who was reportedly there.
The first-year student had to be rushed to the Mount St. John’s Medical Centre (MSJMC) via an ambulance.
“She was not bleeding, but they took her for observation because she was complaining of a severe headache,” one person reported, but did not want to be named.
The chosen spokesperson from among the concerned students told the media that they are all very concerned about the conditions of the classrooms and wider facilities.
Health complaints include frequent sneezing and headaches.
Speaking on behalf of the student body, that individual said, “There is a general concern about the safety; the partitions are rotten… the deplorable conditions include the filthy bathrooms and no running water…mould on the walls and tiles in the classroom, the tutorial rooms.”
There are also complaints of a shortage of classrooms and a lack of sufficient desks and chairs, which force the students to cut into the time for lesson periods to get furniture from other classrooms and bring it to the room where they would have specific subjects.
(More in today’s Daily Observer)