One of the oldest schools in Ashanti Region, K.O Methodist has through the years produced many prominent Ghanaians including politicians, footballers, doctors and other professionals.

The school has been the foundation of education in the Ashanti region prior to Ghana’s independence. The Asantehene, Prempeh II was instrumental in founding the early schools including K.O. Methodist and Prempeh College to educate the Ashantis.

The Methodist Church as a result built however, it is gradually disappearing as surrounding businesses slowly move in to take over the school land.

Part of the school field has been converted into car parks leaving the school children with limited playing ground.

Lack of security and neglect has also left the school in a deplorable state with no fence wall and broken doors and windows in the classrooms.

In 2021 a noise pollution study was conducted at K.O Methodist by the Architecture department at KNUST.

According to the report, the noise generated by the surrounding businesses was far beyond the World Health Organization (WHO) permissible limit of 35dB for a school, by 90 – 107% inside the classrooms.

The noise recorded in an unoccupied classroom was 64.3dB which is also far above the WHO acceptable limit. This was the noise generated solely by vehicles, hawkers and other commercial activities.

They observed that the noise exposure to the school increased and peaked during the busy hours of the day, 10am to 3pm when classes were also in session.

The detrimental effect on the school children by this level of noise pollution as indicated in the study are multi-problems to the teaching and learning process.

Amongst them are lack of concentration and comprehension, speech interference, discomfort among teachers and pupils, and eventually decline in the child’s academic performance and development.

How can children learn in such noisy and deplorable conditions? Instead of preserving one of the oldest schools in Ashanti Region as part of our history in educational development as a nation, it has been turned into shops.