One Teacher, 40 Students, a Leaking Roof: Suasu Town’s Only School Is Barely Standing

Published: April 15, 2026

SUASU TOWN, Maryland County — Harriton Kwarbo arrives at Suasu Public School every morning as the only teacher, the administrator, the caretaker and, on most days, the only thing standing between 40 children and no education at all.

He teaches nursery, grade one and grade two simultaneously, in classrooms with leaking roofs that force lessons to stop when it rains, with students sitting on broken furniture or the bare floor because there are no desks, in a building that has gone unrepaired since a rubber tree crashed through two of its classrooms in 2018.

What was once a primary school running from nursery through sixth grade now stops at grade two, not because children stopped coming, but because teachers stopped being sent.

“The decline is not due to lack of interest from students,” a community member said. “It is a shortage of teachers and minimal institutional support.”

For the children who do manage to complete grade two, the path forward is a walk of up to an hour each way to reach schools in neighboring communities, a daily journey that exposes them to safety risks and quietly pushes dropout rates higher.

Some parents have already begun to question whether sending their children to school under these conditions is worth it. Enrollment and attendance have started to reflect that doubt.

The school building itself tells the story of years of institutional neglect. The 2018 storm damage that rendered two classrooms unusable has never been repaired. The remaining rooms leak. Students who cannot bring chairs from home sit on what is broken or on the ground.

District education officials acknowledge the problem and say plans are underway to redistribute teachers from other schools to address the staffing shortage. They offered no timeline for when that would happen.