When Racy & Sturdy Schools was founded on October 23rd, 1999, its founders were strongly determined to take a big stride with a vision of providing qualitative education. Therefore, employing adequately qualified staff, particularly teachers, is an uncompromising stance of the school founders to achieve this vision. “We don’t employ teachers anyhow. We ensure the people we employ as teachers are well-trained and trainable. We give them in-depth orientation on the school’s vision to provide qualitative education,” Prince Mike Adewoye, the school proprietor, said.

Prince Mike Adewoye, who explained how Racy & Sturdy Schools was founded by divine revelation, said the Montessori school is aimed at “raising children academically, morally, vocationally and dynamically.” From the onset, the school introduced some teaching aids uncommon in most private and public schools to enhance the learning and understanding of its pupils/students. “My background as an engineer helped me in this effort at introducing some teaching aids uncommon in most private and public schools, which helps our pupils/students to learn more effectively. That is the strength and pillar of Racy & Sturdy,” Adewoye disclosed.

Among the teaching aids the school deploys are electronic teaching aids, with the use of internet facilities, interactive boards and other scientific teaching methods to keep the school and its pupils/students at pace with modern global technologies. The school is intelligently careful in using electronic devices in teaching its students so that they are not affected by the inherent distractions the devices cause.

With these teaching gadgets in place, both the teaching and non-teaching staff of Racy & Sturdy work harmoniously as a team and family in building confidence and self-esteem in their pupils/students with cordiality. This fosters continuity, particularly among the teaching staff, which discourages incessant resignation of teachers from the school, unlike in other schools where teachers resign incessantly. The school does not also play with the welfare and safety of its pupils/students.

“We put some safety gadgets in place. The entire school is monitored by CCTV to monitor the movement of our pupils/students. Right from my office here, I watch everywhere in the school. I watch all the classrooms. I can see who is coming in and who is going out. If I’m outside my office, all activities going on in the school are being recorded. Nobody can just walk in and pick any child. Our teachers and other staff are very conscious of the school premises,” Prince Adewoye revealed.

Racy & Sturdy continuously invests in capacity building to enhance its service delivery to the utmost satisfaction of both parents and students of the school. The proprietor, Adewoye, began the capacity building with himself. In spite of being a mechanical engineer, he returned to the university to study technical education. He furthered at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), Ogbomoso, Oyo State, where he obtained a Master’s in Human Resources Management. And part of the school’s capacity-building efforts is the school’s project to relocate to a bigger site in the next academic session that will accommodate the ever-increasing student population of the school and also provide a boarding school education.

“We conduct weekly assessment tests for our pupils/students to know their strengths and also weaknesses that their teachers must work on more to improve them. We also run a feedback mechanism through which we measure the pulse of the students and their parents on their academic performances and on other areas of need. From the feedback, we know the needs of each child and attend to such needs immediately. We also ensure their teachers always give weekly reports on their assessments of the pupils/students for proper evaluation,” Adewoye disclosed.

Racy & Sturdy discovers, develops and nurtures talents in music. It has a music class stocked with various types of musical equipment like saxophones, guitars and drums, etc., to train its pupils/students. Through this music class, one of the students of the school won a whopping sum of N3m in a musical competition. “Learning does not end in the four corners of the classroom. We also train some of our students to become professional dancers. An organization did a research work on the first 1,000 schools in Africa that have been having good, consistent results in external examinations in the last three years. Racy & Sturdy Schools is listed among the 50 schools in the West African sub-region in that research,” Adewoye disclosed.

Prince Mike Adewoye revealed that he had just concluded a thorough research on the South Korean and Japanese educational systems, and that he would incorporate the educational innovations he acquired from both systems into the running of Racy & Sturdy from the next academic session. He assured that, with the knowledge he acquired from the research, Racy & Sturdy would organise retreats for its teachers to retrain them and impart knowledge and information that would increase their teaching capacity for the benefit of the pupils/students of the school.
Prince Mike Adewoye
For information on admission: Racy & Sturdy Schools is located at 2, Abuode Street, off … [the remainder of the address is obscured in the photograph]. Tel: 08036789605.

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in Christian Benefits Magazine Schools Supplement in 2011